Illustration by Aude Van Ryn

“No weather will be found in this book,” Mark Twain declares in the opening pages of his 1892 novel “The American Claimant.” He has determined to do without it, he explains, on the ground that it usually just gets in the way of the story. “Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it,” he writes, “because of delays on account of the weather.”

Twain was not alone in mistrusting meteorological activity in fiction. As literary subjects go, weather has a terrible reputation. More precisely, it has two terrible reputations that do not get along. On the one hand, weather is widely regarded as the most banal topic in the world—in print as in conversation, the one we resort to when we have nothing else to say. On the other hand, it stands perpetually accused of melodrama. “It was a dark and stormy night,” begins Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel “Paul Clifford,” which goes on to invoke torrential rain, gusting wind, guttering lamplight, and rattling rooftops: weather as plot, setting, star, and supporting cast of what is, by broad consensus, the worst sentence in the history of English literature.

Melodramatic or banal prose mostly gets blamed on the author, reasonably enough. But melodrama and banality are aesthetic judgments, and, as such, they are sometimes also products of their context. Twain was writing in the late nineteenth century, a time when the field of meteorology was belatedly coming into its own. With that scientific model of weather in ascendance, the literary models came to seem suspect. Weather facts served to make weather fictions seem overwrought, while the newly empirical understanding of the atmosphere—and, more staggering at the time, the ability to predict its behavior—made weather itself seem suddenly more prosaic.

That was the context in which Twain joked about eradicating weather from his work. But even he conceded that “weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience.” Through the ages, we have used weather in our stories to illuminate the workings of our universe, our culture, our politics, our relationships, and ourselves. Before “The American Claimant” was published, sans weather, you might as easily have searched the canon for a novel without adverbs. Twain was likely correct when he called his weatherless book “the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature.”

Twain died in 1910, too soon to discover that his joke turned out to be borderline prophetic. After maintaining its centrality in Western literature for millennia, weather, while by no means vanishing entirely, faded in importance in the twentieth century. Only in our own time are we seeing it return in significant ways to our stories—thanks, as it happens, to the same forces that drove it away in the first place.

Storms sent to punish, lightning to frighten, thunder to humble, floods to obliterate: across nearly all cultures, the first stories that we told about weather were efforts to explain it, and the explanations invariably came down to divine agency. From the bag of winds gifted to Aeolus to the Biblical drought visited on Jerusalem, meteorological phenomena first appear in the narrative record as tools used by deities to battle one another and to help or hinder humans.

Early religions distributed those tools profligately. In Greek mythology, the wind alone was apportioned among more than a dozen gods, goddesses, nymphs, and demons—to say nothing of Zeus, who ruled the sky, and Poseidon, who could stir up storms. But, with the rise of monotheism, dominion over the elements was consolidated into a single God, and bad weather, like suffering and death, became one of those things which we brought down on ourselves through sin. In Eden, the climate was perfectly temperate. Only after the banishment of Adam and Eve did God—in the words of Milton, in “Paradise Lost”—“affect the Earth with cold and heat / Scarce tolerable,” and summon “ice / And snow and haile and stormie gust.”

Meteorology would never entirely shed these religious undertones; even the eminently dry and secular field of contract law continues to call an unexpected weather event an “act of God.” But by the time that Milton was writing, in the mid-seventeenth century, the role of weather in literature was shifting. While our earliest weather stories tried to explain meteorological phenomena, subsequent ones used meteorological phenomena to explain ourselves. Weather, in other words, went from being mythical to being metaphorical. In a symbolic system that is now so familiar as to be intuitive, atmospheric conditions came to stand in for the human condition.

That symbolic use of weather is the subject of Alexandra Harris’s “Weatherland” (Thames & Hudson), a forthcoming history of weather in English literature. “My subject is not the weather itself,” she writes, “but the weather as it is daily recreated in the human imagination.” Her survey begins with an astute observation: weather works so well as a symbol partly because its literal manifestation is oddly slippery. “Meteorological phenomena are serially elusive,” she writes. “Winds and air-fronts reveal their characters only in the effects they have on other things.” A breeze sends smoke drifting northward from a chimney; a thermal betrays itself in the effortless upward trajectory of a hawk; low temperatures make themselves visible as our breath hanging in the air. Weather, one of the most potent forces in our lives, is often imperceptible, perpetually changing, and frequently mysterious.

As Harris points out, all of this makes it a convenient substitute for another “serially elusive” phenomenon: the self. King Lear, Shakespeare tells us, was “minded like the weather”—as charged and turbulent as the storm that raged around him on the heath. In a way, we have all been minded like the weather ever since, so accustomed have we become to using meteorology to describe mental activity. Minds are foggy (unless they are experiencing a brainstorm), temperaments sunny, attitudes chilly; moods blow in and out. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud; Robert Frost, in “Tree at My Window,” explicitly compared outer and inner weather. Harris draws particular attention to the association between minds and clouds, from the cumulus shape of the cartoon thought bubble to the early Christian belief that Adam’s mind was made from a pound of clouds. She might also have cited Sartre, who memorably described consciousness as “a wind blowing from nowhere toward the world.”

As a set of symbols, weather also blows toward the world; we use it to describe not only ourselves but our private relationships and our societies as a whole. Nabokov characterized his marriage to Véra Slonim with a one-word emotional-weather report: “cloudless.” Emily Brontë conjured the opposite kind of relationship in “Wuthering Heights.” When we first meet Catherine Earnshaw, she is a ghostly hand rapping on a window in a storm—which is to say, she is essentially the storm itself, rattling the glass panes of her former home. At every point thereafter, emotional drama and atmospheric drama are one. If Lear is minded like the weather, Catherine and Heathcliff are bodied like it—together, the most famous storm ever to strike the Yorkshire moors.

Six years later and two hundred miles to the southeast, Dickens summoned vastly drearier conditions for “Bleak House”—which, outside of the Book of Revelation, might have the most consistently dreadful weather of any work of Western literature. “It rains for the first twelve chapters,” Harris notes, “before pausing and raining again.” The skies are further blackened by soot and smoke—in Dickens’s words, “gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” Fog smothers the city. The mud is so abundant that it is “as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth”; in what may be the only dinosaur cameo in Victorian literature, Dickens imagines a forty-foot Megalosaurus slogging through it up Holborn Hill.