Sterne

The regiment was disbanded; a few days later, in Clonmel, a subaltern’s wife gave birth to Laurence Sterne. He would later call his arrival “so inopportune”—the first joke in a childhood shadowed by misfortune.

H. D. Traill’s biography follows Sterne from his birth in 1713 into the unsettled life of an army household, forever packing up as postings send it between Ireland and England. His father is at the mercy of military orders, while his mother endures perilous journeys, repeated childbirth and the loss of children. In Sterne’s own brisk recollections, hardship and absurdity travel side by side; Traill asks what such a childhood can tell us about the writer who emerged from it. What did the boy carry with him through all those journeys?

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