Laurence Sterne Biography Quotes 32 Report mistakes

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Occup.	Novelist
From	Ireland
Born	November 24, 1713 Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland
Died	March 18, 1768
Aged	54 years

Early Life and Family
Laurence Sterne was born on 24 November 1713 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland, into a family that moved constantly with the British Army. His father, Roger Sterne, was an officer whose postings carried the household from garrison to garrison across Ireland, while his mother, Agnes, maintained a fragile domestic stability within a life of transience and uncertainty. The pressures of military life and frequent dislocations imprinted on Sterne an observational eye for the oddities of character and circumstance that later animated his fiction. After early years spent largely on the move, he was sent to school in Yorkshire at Hipperholme, near Halifax, where he formed a lifelong friendship with John Hall-Stevenson, a spirited companion who would later be affectionately reimagined as Eugenius in his books. Sterne proceeded to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he took his degree and prepared for ordination in the Church of England.

Clerical Career and Marriage
Ordained in the late 1730s, Sterne gained a living at Sutton-on-the-Forest near York, helped at first by his influential uncle Jaques Sterne, a powerful Whig churchman in the York ecclesiastical establishment. In 1741 he married Elizabeth Lumley, whose wit and sensibility initially matched his own. Their union, however, would be buffeted by money worries, Sterne's periods of ill health, and the intense social life that his later literary fame encouraged. They had a daughter, Lydia, the only child to survive infancy. Sterne served dutifully as a parish clergyman, preaching sermons that mingled piety with a gentle, humane humor. In 1759 he published a local satire, later known as A Political Romance, lampooning petty clerical politics in York; the piece offended several dignitaries and helped rupture his relationship with his uncle Jaques, a breach that never fully healed.

Tristram Shandy and Sudden Fame
In 1759 Sterne issued the first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, printed in York and brought to London with modest expectations. The book was a sensation. Its freewheeling voice, digressive structure, and typographical audacity upended conventional narrative. Sterne spoke through the persona of Yorick, playful and tender by turns, and introduced readers to Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and a gallery of characters rendered with affectionate irony. Further volumes followed in quick succession, and Sterne, now famous, traveled to London where he was welcomed into fashionable and literary circles. The actor David Garrick admired him, the painter Joshua Reynolds took his portrait, and Horace Walpole wrote about him with the mixture of fascination and sharpness characteristic of Walpole's letters. Sterne published his Sermons of Mr. Yorick alongside the novel, presenting his clerical voice with the same mixture of feeling and wit that enlivened his fiction.

Patronage, Residence, and Work
In 1760 Sterne was presented to the living of Coxwold in North Yorkshire, a preferment associated with local aristocratic patronage. There he made his home at what is now known as Shandy Hall, a modest house that became a literary landmark. He divided his time between the quiet of Coxwold, the provincial bustle of York, and the annual magnetism of London, composing new volumes of Tristram Shandy and revising sermons while managing parish duties. The book expanded through nine volumes, issued over several years, each teasing expectations of narrative order with digressions, marbled pages, and a candor about bodily and mental life that startled and delighted readers.

Health, Travel, and Friendships
Sterne suffered recurrent illness, probably tuberculosis, and traveled periodically to the Continent in search of relief and gentler climates. France, in particular, furnished both rest and material for later pages. In London he moved among actors, artists, and men of letters, sustaining friendships with Garrick and Reynolds and renewing ties with John Hall-Stevenson. In 1767 he formed a celebrated, tender attachment to Eliza Draper, a young woman married to an East India Company official; she was soon to sail for India, and the parting inspired Sterne to write with an intimacy and delicacy that would appear in his letters and in his next book. Their relationship, while constrained by circumstance and propriety, was central to his final burst of creativity.

Marriage, Estrangement, and Family
Sterne's marriage to Elizabeth Lumley had grown strained. At times they lived apart for reasons of health and compatibility, with periods of reconciliation that could not remedy the underlying discord. Elizabeth spent time on the Continent, at first for her well-being, while their daughter Lydia gradually became Sterne's most constant familial tie. Lydia later married in France and was known as Lydia de Medalle, preserving her father's memory in correspondence and publication after his death. Sterne's break with his uncle Jaques left him without the kind of ecclesiastical patronage that might have reshaped his clerical career; instead, literature and a widening circle of friends defined his public life.

A Sentimental Journey and Final Years
In early 1768 Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Written again under the name Yorick, it distilled the tenderness and observation that had always underlain his comic art into a compact travel narrative, attentive to small gestures and the moral texture of everyday encounters. The book appeared to great acclaim. Yet Sterne's health had deteriorated. He died in London on 18 March 1768, not long after the Journey was published. Contemporary accounts reported that his body was stolen by resurrectionists from the burial ground and recognized on an anatomy table; his remains were later reinterred, a posthumous episode that seemed an eerie echo of the macabre humor threaded through his work.

Style, Reception, and Legacy
Sterne's style fused learned playfulness with compassion. He brought the sermon tradition into dialogue with comic fiction, used digression as a principle of composition, and treated feeling not as mere sentiment but as a moral faculty capable of binding strangers. His pages experimented with blanks, dashes, typographic flourishes, and direct addresses to the reader, inviting participation in the very act of storytelling. This audacity endeared him to contemporaries in London society and abroad, while provoking critics who found his manner mannered. His friendships with figures such as David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, and John Hall-Stevenson situate him at the heart of mid-eighteenth-century artistic life, even as his origins in a peripatetic military family and his steady clerical duties anchored him elsewhere.

Over time, Sterne's reputation has only grown. Tristram Shandy, with its experiments in time, consciousness, and self-reference, has often been seen as a precursor to later narrative innovations, while A Sentimental Journey helped shape the culture of sensibility. The image of Sterne that emerges from the testimonies of those around him is of a man sociable and quick, vulnerable in health, agile in conversation, and unwavering in his belief that kindness and wit could coexist on the page. Irish-born and English by vocation, an Anglican clergyman who became one of the century's defining novelists, he fashioned from the accidents of his life a literature that made accident itself an art.

Our collection contains 32 quotes who is written by Laurence, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Writing - Live in the Moment.

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