Natural Magic: Songs of Rain and Breaking Ice in The Weather Woman

WRITTEN BY LOUISE TREE

Sally Gardner’s The Weather Woman (Head of Zeus, 2022) buys us a ticket into the popular culture of the 18th century, where science and entertainment came together in an interest in automata. These were machines into which technology had breathed the suggestion of life, fascinating spectators with displays of inanimate logic. But they were often a fraud, powered by a real person secreted within the bodywork. The novel opens with the frost fair of January 1789, when the Thames froze at London Bridge, around which sprawled booths and tents exhibiting wild animals and street entertainers. Neva, a three-year-old child of Russian fair folk, listens to the song of the ice beneath everyone’s feet, while her mother, an unbeatable chess player, is sewn into the belly of a chess-playing bear. A fraudulent automaton, it takes on challengers who confidently gamble that they can’t lose.

The ‘Weather Woman’ of the title is an automaton created by Neva’s adoptive clockmaker father to enable her, as an adult, to publicly yet secretly predict the weather. It is a machine of cogs and weights, but the spirit within is Neva and her gift for listening to the songs the weather sings. Gardner explains: “The Weather Woman is a fantastical notion, but it plays into what was soon to come in the history of science and the development of weather forecasting.” She says that the description of the Weather Woman machine took weeks of writing to achieve the right balance between realistic mechanism and the reader’s imagination. Gardner is adept at conjuring magical and theatrical settings in which the reader can believe all things are possible, such as Neva’s home, built from the skeleton of a galleon, and the Weather Woman’s carefully staged performances. Gardner’s background in theatrical design is influential. She says: “Theatre has played a great part in my life, and I feel it is vital to conjure up magical spaces. I like scene setting. And I know if I can’t return to the same place the next day then the writing is no good.”

In the 18th century, women’s voices are becoming more discernible. In seeking them, Gardner says that she tried as much as possible “to read original sources, letters and memoirs”. She also found the work of Georgette Heyer useful, as she regards Heyer’s research as “second to none”. In the afterword to the novel, Gardner acknowledges the extraordinary wealth of books for the period in the London Library, in particular on gambling and the London frost fairs, all smelling of “a time long gone”. What she found most fascinating in her reading of women’s memoirs of that time is “how modern the women sound. They are concerned with all the things that worry us but are devoid of electricity and technology. And they have a different relationship with time. We worry at it endlessly while they have a great understanding of its passing and of the shortness of life.”

The novel has the complexity of a Shakespeare or Mozart comedy with characters whose stories, past and present, interconnect. There is a motif of shipwreck, and several sets of separated lovers move back toward each other as in a Jane Austen romance, Gardner’s “favourite writer of that age”. The 18th century is bookended by Shakespeare and Dickens, two writers whom Gardner happily admits to being influenced by; and there is a delicious Dickensian mood to Gardner’s London and such characters as Mr. Ratchett with his dog, Old Bones. Indeed, Gardner believes Dickensian characters still haunted London’s Gray’s Inn when she was growing up there.

Gardner uses the device of cross-dressing in the way Shakespeare did, “to give a female character agency in a time when History was not Herstory”. Neva’s story is one of exceptional female insight into natural phenomena and her quest for true self-expression; but to have freedom and authority, she must shape shift. She creates a male persona, Eugene Jonas, so she can attend scientific lectures, go to Brooks’s men’s club, and get drunk with the man she loves. Women’s self-expression necessitated some form of ventriloquism to ensure anonymity: Neva’s voice is thrown from male clothing or mechanised by the wood and iron of the Weather Woman. The body of the automaton acts as a metaphor for her silenced social body, and she must release herself from the machine in order to fully inhabit her nature and publicly express her predictive gift.

The richness of the 18th century might lead a writer in all directions, and Gardner does admit to getting into a ”muddle” when she began writing the novel. She explains that this was in part due to her method of not planning a story in advance, but of letting the characters lead the way. The thread which led her out of this labyrinth was the weather: “I found a fabulous collection of meteorological observations, the Vox Stellarum, from 1791 through to 1814, a wonderful book that became my bible and helped me make sense of the timespan and the weather of the novel. There were no proper records, and this almanack was a great help.” The period’s interest in natural phenomena such as the formation of clouds was subject to rational investigative methods, yet the weather remained either the province of God or a case study for scientific men, with nothing in between – it was certainly not the province of women or instinctive knowledge. “We seem to see the arrogance that stripped instinctual voices of the time of any power,” Gardner explains. “Native American and many other tribal communities had a completely different relationship to the skies. In aboriginal culture, the weather was a book to be read.” This way of seeing is shown to be a vulnerability, putting Neva in danger of incarceration for madness. The risks we run from denying instinctive voices is suggested here. As a child, Neva can prevent a tragedy, but she is not to be believed: at the frost fair, as watermen and visitors merrily improvise on the frozen Thames, only Neva can hear the ”unearthly sound” of the ice singing that it will break.

About the contributor: Louise Tree writes reviews for HNR, has research interests in the writing of history in the eighteenth century, and is at work on a novel set in Occupied France.

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 104 (May 2023)