May 2001

Laurence Sterne, born in Clonmel in County Tipperary in 1713, was in his mid-forties when the publication of 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen' catapulted him from obscurity to literary fame. The extraordinary story of how a provincial clergyman became the most fashionable writer of his day is all the more remarkable for having been engineered by its self-publicizing subject. Two bestselling volumes of sermons followed, paradoxically attracting as much moral censure as his comic novel had commanded admiration. Shocked critics denounced him as a scandal to the cloth but Sterne stood firm, revelling in the fame and wealth his age's obsession with novelty and fashion allowed him

If Sterne found sudden celebrity a compensation for years characterized by sickness and the confines of a country life, he remained unhappily married to a long-suffering wife. Known in his Yorkshire parishes as a libertine, he sought solace in sentimental liaisons, most famously with a much younger married woman, Elizabeth Draper, for whom he wrote the celebrated 'Journal to Eliza'. A second novel, 'A Sentimental Journey', which teasingly explores the connection between sexual desire and moral feeling, appeared a month before his untimely death at the age of fifty-four.

'Tristram Shandy' in particular remains one of the most innovative and influential novels in world literature. In this biography, the author makes full use of recent literary and historical scholarship in order to examine the life and career and Laurence Sterne and the cult of the celebrity author.