Anyone who has spent any time in England knows about rain. And that particular damp chill that my late mother-in-law once referred to as “raw.”
In Austen, someone, always a female, sits inside looking out a window. At the rain, the clouds, the mud. The impossibility of going out.
We’ve experienced a drought – the first in a long time – and the days have been brilliantly sunny and mild. But this morning, as I walked the dog, it rained all day and it was raw. As well as grey.
Grey is very Austen – there is even a Miss Grey who mucks up the works for Marianne is Sense and Sensibility– and I once wrote an essay called “Getting Used to Grey,” about the seasonal shift in New York from the bright sun of the fall to the blanket of gloom that descends on the region around Thanksgiving, not to leave us until May.
This is the season of being inside, of tea and books, of distractions that take us away from the weather, which is certainly a character in much of Austen. An easy nemesis to many plans, it drives her heroines indoors, relegating them to endless games of whist or piquet or performances on the pianoforte. Indeed, there must be university shelves filled with weather as subject in the novels of Austen.
I am once more getting used to grey, battling my own tendency to stay indoors, and argue the impossibility of going out. Thank goodness dogs needs walking, errands need running, and bodies need exercise.
‘Tis the season of grey. And the return of rain.