IT WAS A DARK & STORMY NIGHT...

Weather scenes in fiction is a beautiful thing. It is entirely up to you, the reader as to the magical vision in your mind. You are given the words, the description- and the weather unfolds the way only you interpret it.

IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT...

The original book which starts with this phrase, the utmost favourite here at Wet & Wendy was written by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton at the beginning of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

A few other beautiful weather scenes from some of the classics...

EMMA- Jane Austin- 1815

The evening of this day was very long and melancholy...the weather added what it could of gloom. A cold, stormy rain set in, and nothing of July appeared but in the trees and shrubs, which the wind was despoiling, and the length of the day, which only made such cruel sights the longer visible.

TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE - F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1922

The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman's hand on a tired forehead.

 STORM- George Rippey Stewart- 1941

This novel, featuring a Pacific storm called "Maria". prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms. This is still the case today.

As a man is conceived in the fierce onset of opposing natures, so also a storm begins in the clash of dry cold air from the north and the mild moist air of the south. Like a person, a storm is a focus of activities, continuing and varying through a longer or shorter period of time, having a birth, youth, maturity, old age and death. It moves, in a sense, it reproduces its kind, and even takes in food, exhausts it of energy and casts out the waste.