Last week we visited Coxwold, a small village in North Yorkshire, home to Shandy Hall. Shandy Hall was the home of the author Laurence Sterne. He lived there as a perpetual curate from 1760 to 1768.
On this occasion we spent most of our time exploring the garden, as well as visiting the Glen Baxter exhibition, but it is splendid to visit the home of one the funniest and most experimental novelists: Laurence Sterne.
Whilst living at Shandy Hall, Laurence Sterne completed his novel - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, as well as writing A Sentimental Journey.
Tristram Shandy is a novel that defies narrative conventions—digressive, metafictional, and deeply comic. Sterne plays with time, narrative structure, and typography (there are blank pages, marbled pages, and even a black page for mourning). Stretching to nine volumes, the novel purports to be an autobiography of the narrator, but it gets sidetracked on everything from ancient philosophy to the workings of a clock! We learn hardly anything about Shandy himself.
Shandy Hall has so much in common with the author of this groundbreaking novel. It rambles, there are so many additions to the original medieval house and, just like the novel, the Hall grew in unexpected directions. Georgian additions to the medieval core; a working farm, a rectory and now a museum celebrating all things Shandyesque.
We had a wonderful day in Coxwold and wound up with a visit to Byland Abbey and Mainsgill Farm Shop, where in true Shandy style we enjoyed the camels! Such an anachronism in the middle of a Yorkshire field!