Novel openings with weather

[Becky Lindroos]

No one has mentioned: 
“It was a dark and stormy night …”   
From Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford -  (1830) 


"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been
wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning;
but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early)
the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a
rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of
the question.”
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847) 

I believe Ruskin called it the “pathetic fallacy” or something - not because it was pathetic as we understand the  term,  but because the weather use used to set an emotional tone -  empathetic/sympathetic/pathetic.  

Becky 




> On Mar 28, 2017, at 1:18 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Perhaps only a few geniuses, one of them Pynchon, could open a story, Entropy, with an epigraph about weather---
> Miller from Tropic of Cancer--check it out--- and end the story with weather (or the lack of it, so to speak). 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 8:46 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> "The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end."
> 
> Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections.
> 
> That's more like it. Thrown snowballs that carry hats into the wind and star sides of cousins – I wouldn't call that opening with weather. 
> 
> 2017-03-28 8:24 GMT+02:00 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>:
> 
> "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of the
> Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off
> Delaware, --- (...)."
> 
> Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon
> 
> 
>  > ... Elmore Leonard, who was a very successful novelist, had said,
> "Never open a book with weather." This is also advice found in a lot of
> writing guides ... <
> 
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 
> 

"One ought not to allow oneself the luxury of losing one’s head."
—Vita Sackville-West 

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