Dominic Smith: The Year without a Summer: On the Uses of Weather and Atmosphere in Fiction (January 2015)

Weather is often taken for granted in fiction, or treated as a simplistic, overly-determined extension of our characters’ moods. Dominic Smith examines the legacy of weather as it has been passed down from Gothic and Victorian literatures, looking at examples in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles as well as Rick Bass’s “The Hermit’s Story” and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.