Laurence Sterne: A Life (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS173 thoughts. In spite ofNovak's nearly eight hundred pages, the Defoe mystery deepens. This is not to say that Novak's book is not often lively and informative, as well as sensible in many ofitsjudgments. In his writings on politics, economics , and social problems, Novak summarizes at one point, Defoe despite his Christian beliefs had a "progressive and secular vision" (p. 122). Coming from Novak, that is an excellent guiding principle for reading Defoe, and I think the strongest aspect ofthis book is intellectual history in which Novak revisits his earlier studies, Economics and tL· Fiction ofDaniel Defoe and Defoe and the Nature ofMan. But this book might have been half as long, and accomplishedjust as much. Like Backscheider before him (but unlikeJames Sutherland, that shrewd Scot, whose life [1937] is still the best and most readable biography) , he tends towards hagiography, and for him Defoe is always right and can do almost no wrong. He also tends to promote an inflated sense of Defoe's intellectual importance, finding at one point that the opening dialogue in TheFamily Instructor "foreshadows" Pope's An Essay on Man (they are both dialogues about God that take place in a garden). Professional students of Defoe's work (I am one) will certainly need to read Novak's book. It now shares the stage with Backscheider's as a definitive biography, and protruding from the mass of often fanciful biographical speculation there is a mass ofsolid information and precise critical and historical discussion about Defoe's career as a writer. But the general audience for which this sometimes chatty and always nicely lucid biographical narrative seems intended will be unlikely to want to sign on for nearly eight hundred pages. John Richetti University of Pennsylvania Ian Campbell Ross. Laurence Sterne: A Life. Oxford and NewYork: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001. xiii + 498pp. $56. ISBN 9-780192-122353. The standard biography of Sterne is Arthur H. Cash's Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (1975), and Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (1986), two volumes of equal length but very unequal span, as the first volume runs from 1713 to 1760, and the second volume covers the last eight years of Sterne's life. This imbalance makes sense: before the huge success of Tristram Shandy, Sterne's life as an obscure Yorkshire parson is not very well documented. His years of fame were short, and they were overshadowed by several scandals. After his death, his correspondence was badly edited by his daughter Lydia and partly forged (notably by William Combe); weak imitations were passed off as his—Richard Griffiths's The Triumvirate and the Posthumous Works ofa Late Celebrated Genius (1770), also known 174EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 asTL· Koran, actually made it to several editions of Sterne's works and inspired Goethe and Tolstoy, who both thought it Sterne's. His reputation was harmed byJohn Croft, who wrote malicious reminiscences, mosüy fabricated , in Scrapeana (1792), and by a damning critique by Thackeray, and academic English Studies have not quite forgotten the influential Dr Leavis's shortsighted rejection ofSterne as nasty and trifling. Early biographers had very little to go on. Indeed, all biographers have reason to hate Sterne's brother-in-law,John Botham, who burnt most of his papers after his death. Ian Campbell Ross is fully aware of the work of his predecessors, and like them he has to cope with the relative scarcity of hard facts as a foundation for a full-fledged biography. He has incorporated all the new evidence that has come to light since Cash, mostly silently, except when rejecting some ofit (tactfully, in an endnote, as is the case with most ofMonkman's ascriptions aired in early volumes of TL· Shandean and some of Melvyn New's theological findings). Laurence Sterne: A Life begins in medias res, at the turning point in Sterne's life, but quickly goes back in time and covers his life chronologically in fifteen gracefully written chapters, to come to a close in a wonderfully wry epilogue. Ross is very good at plotting the difficulties and frustrations of Sterne's life before the success of Tristram Shandy, and better than anyone before him on...