Atmospheric Exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte's Weather Wisdom

As her family name suggests, Jane Eyre is exceptionally responsive to changes in the weather. In her eponymous "autobiography," Jane's ability to predict future events and assume an embodied yet occasionally omniscient insight alerts us to the ways in which Charlotte Bronte's fiction leverages the rise of climate science as a basis for successful female authorship. In opposition to the prevailing belief of the Victorian medical establishment that storms prompted hysteria and exacerbated symptoms of women's biological "periodicity," Bronte's first published novel draws the sensitive body and insightful mind of its female protagonist into close alliance. Far from reflecting a nervous pathology, Jane's empowered responses to the air demonstrate the ways in which meteorological concepts such as weather wisdom and lunarism prove vital to nineteenth-century fiction.