Apart from modesty, there is not much reason to make an apology for a new book on Sterne. There is no flood of essays and monographs threatening to drown it in superfluity, nor any prior brisk debate to make it seem to have missed the tide of fashionable polemic. In the ferment of the last decade, Richardson is the only male novelist of the eighteenth century to have benefited. Clarissa has been the object of critical and theoretical discussion whose freshness and energy have spilled over into into what used to be the deserts of eighteenth-century literature – novels by women – and made them bloom again.

Sterne's failure to share in this harvest – not to mention Fielding's or Smollett's – is worth thinking about. After his rehabilitation earlier this century, his popularity and semi-canonical status in the ranks of English literature were probably bound by the nature of things to wane. More specifically, his Whiggish centrism, his weakness for sly innuendos about female sexuality, and the anti-feminist readings some of his stories will bear, have appealed less and less to readers who expect a more candid and less marginalising approach to sexual politics in fiction. Tristram Shandy must strike them as the sort of novel Robert Lovelace would have written, had he lived long enough to find impotence a joke. Richardson's stock has risen precisely because he dramatises the sort of conflict that develops between a female reader and Sterne. Clarissa's contempt for narrow views, bawdy talk and the sexualising arts of her lover might be echoed by Tristram's ‘madam’ if she had a voice of her own.