“Living Barometers,” “Dreary Fellowship,” “Petulant People,” and “Silly Fancies”: Weather, Equilibrium, and Health in Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853)

In her final novel, Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë created a heroine who seems to be profoundly affected by air, weather, and atmosphere. Lucy Snowe’s encounters with contagion, by contrast, are rare. Lucy’s often “dreary fellowship,” described as exclusive to the unhealthy, with “the winds and their changes” (300) pervades the text. As several critics have noted, Brontë’s own belief that mind and body were affected by weather was legitimated by contemporary assumptions about the connections between atmosphere and health, and especially female health. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) also presented Brontë as irredeemably sensitive to the weather, in ways which this chapter argues have come to form our understanding of the writer, her health, and her own sense of the connections between weather and health. In the 1850s, to be sensitive to the weather was not always considered a positive characteristic: such sensitivity was often presented either as an affectation, or as the result of an invalid’s self-imposed excessive protection from the elements. This chapter argues that in Villette Brontë offers an active critique of the qualities of the weather sensitivity and weather wisdom which Gaskell had attributed to her, and explores the tensions inherent in either quarantining oneself from, or exposing oneself to, the weather.