The life and letters of Laurence Sterne -

Lewis Melville

Amazon Books

2016

326 páginas

10h 52m

ISBN-13: 9781115291668

Excerpt from The Life and Letters of Laurence Sterne, Vol. 1 of 2
It is astonishing that a man of letters so eminent as Laurence Sterne should have had to wait nearly a hundred years for a biographer. John Wilkes and John Hall-Stevenson, when their friend died, announced their intention to write his life, but, in spite of his daughter's frequent reminders, they never even began the task. It was not until the eve of the centenary of his death that the "Life of Sterne," by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, appeared; and this work remained in sole possession of the field for several decades. "It contains," Mr. Traill wrote of it in his monograph on Sterne, contributed in 1882 to the "English Men of Letters" series, "nearly all the information as to the facts of Sterne's life that is now ever likely to be recovered." This statement, happily, was soon falsified by the discovery of numerous letters and other material, which Mr. Fitzgerald incorporated in the 1896 edition of his work; and once again critics declared that now the sources of information were all disclosed.