Why Rebecca has kept a weather eye
on the climate at Wuthering Heights

When the Brontës set out to reveal the secrets of the human heart, they wanted their readers to experience passions that no one would have dared to mention in polite 19th century society.

In what could become cliché in the hands of lesser writers, it was often left to the forces of nature to allow us to read between lines that described the ever-changing Yorkshire weather.

“One evening, however, in the last week of the vacation, he arrived – unexpectedly; for a heavy and protracted thundershower during the afternoon had almost destroyed my hopes of seeing him that day; but now the storm was over, and the sun was shining brightly.” So wrote Anne Brontë in Agnes Grey, under the pseu donym Acton Bell, as her debut novel was rushed out in 1847 following the unexpected success of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.

The Brontë canon might have been in its infancy, but it was already clear that their work was in major part influenced by the gritty landscape around the parsonage at Haworth and the volatile elements.

No Brontë novel was ever complete without vivid descriptions of the wild winds “wuthering” across the moors, thunder and lightning, freezing rain pelting down and other foul weather making the prospect of a walk unlikely.

The turbulent English weather shaking the screen would become a standard device in Hollywood when the new-fangled film industry started to get to grips with the sisters’ classic works.

But new research in the Brontës’ birthplace has revealed there was just as much sunshine as rain in their work – if not more.

Artist Rebecca Chesney began casting a close eye over spidery daily weather observations, jotted down more than a century ago, for a project at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

To Brontë followers, the painstaking meteorological descriptions in the novels are familiar as a clever literary device employed by all three of them to hint at suppressed but raging passions. But Cheseny was more interested in the hard data lurking in the text than the heart-stopping power of prose. Indeed, when she began her research she says she had never picked up a single Brontë novel – although during the course of her studies she has come to revel in what she had been missing.

“At first my passion was for landscape and nature and I had never read any of the books before. Now I have read most of them – and many of the hundreds of letters and poems. I think their writing is absolutely wonderful. But what is so magical is that, having studied the dates, I can see they were observing all types of weather – and not just the snow and storms...”

Ten months ago, Rebecca installed a digital weather station at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, to record sunshine, rainfall, wind speed, air pressure and temperature for the next year. She was helped by a team of local weather collectors who contributed daily personal reflections on the weather.

Her initial quest was to compare the modern readings with historical weather records and descriptions in Brontë letters and novels with the aim of creating a new body of artwork to display at the Parsonage.

What she did not expect as she delved deeper and deeper was how much the research began to point towards the family obsession with the weather turning from a writer’s curiosity to literally a matter of life and death. It is now emerged as a scientific fact that all three sisters became increasingly preoccupied with the weather, both in their novels and personal letters, as their thoughts turned as much to Tuberculosis and death as love and marriage.

Crucial to the research, was the access the Parsonage was able to provide to the hand-written journals kept by Brontë neighbour and weatherman Abraham Shackleton, who recorded the weather on a daily basis throughout the lives of all the Brontës.

The first surprise came when Rebecca compared the jottings with the modern data harvested from the digital weather station. Findings will delight climate change sceptics.

She found the weather on certain days in 2011 and 2012 was virtually identical to some of the conditions described in novels such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She explains: “Shackleton took records every single day in the life of the Brontës – and from a general look at the journals I would say the weather has not changed very much.

“There were very wet and very dry years, beautiful springs and bad summers. They were commenting on exactly the same things we are today.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is a classic example of how descriptions of the weather are used as dramatic punctuation in key points of the story. Take the summer evening Mr Rochester proposes to Jane: “Where the sun had gone down in simple state – pure of the pomp of clouds – spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, on one hill–peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven.”

But the same evening ends with a great storm: “...a livid, vivid spark leapt out of a cloud at which I was looking, and there was a crack, a crash, and a close rattling peal; and I thought only of hiding my dazzled eyes.”

But while Ms Chesney’s approach was scientific her objective was also artistic. Her efforts were focused on creating Hope’s Whisper, a small exhibition that has helped to bring visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum this summer. The ongoing weather data work can be followed online.

Emily mentions wind the most in Wuthering Heights; Charlotte mentioned rain and snow the most, in Jane Eyre, and Anne descibes sunshine the most in Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Online viewers can see a series of graphs comparing the fictional weather of the novels.

Jenna Holmes, Arts Officer at the Museum, says “The novels are rooted in the landscape of the Yorkshire moorland. Its turbulent weather is vividly represented throughout their literary worlds...Even today, visitors to the museum perceive the weather to be somehow representative of an ‘authentic’ Brontë experience, with wild winds ‘wuthering’ across the moor.

“This was Rebecca Chesney’s starting premise; that by understanding the changing weather in Haworth she might find new perspectives on the Brontës’ lives and works.”

The artist’s weather research provides a new slant on the writers’ preoccupations with their health.

Charlotte’s references to the changing seasons became more and more urgent throughout 1848 and 1849 – as fears of consumption led to the weather preying on her mind rather serving as an inspiration. A hard look at the daily weather conditions around Howarth during the period suggests she may have had good reason to worry. It will again have scholars wondering whether the unusually high rainfall of 1848 could have contributed to Branwell, Emily and Anne’s susceptibility to tuberculosis.

And there lies perhaps the most poignant irony of the Brontë saga – that the very weather that inspired so much of their writing was also to cut tragically short one of English literature’s most astonishing success stories.

The Brontë Weather Project: http://www.Brontë.org.uk