Sterne, Laurence (1713–1768)

Irish writer. Sterne was born in Clonmel, County Tipperary, and ordained in 1737. He created the comic anti-hero Tristram Shandy in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent (1759–67). An eccentrically whimsical and bawdy novel, its associations of ideas on the philosophic principles of John Locke, and other devices, foreshadow in part some of the techniques associated with the 20th-century novel, such as stream-of-consciousness. His other works include A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768).

Sterne became vicar of Sutton-in-the-Forest, Yorkshire, in 1738, and married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741, an unhappy union largely because of his infidelity. He had a sentimental love affair with Elizabeth Draper, recorded in his Letters of Yorick to Eliza (1775).