75 © The Author(s) 2019 A. Collett, O. Murphy (eds.), Romantic Climates, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16241-2_5 CHAPTER 5 ‘Out of Season’: The Narrative Ecology of Persuasion Amelia Dale AUSTEN AND THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER ‘I talked of its’ [sic] being bad weather for the Hay–& he returned me the comfort of its’ being much worse for the Wheat’, Austen writes, in a letter to her nephew, James-Edward Austen, on 9 July 1816, recounting a con- versation with Edward Woolls. 1 In the same letter she describes how the weather ‘is really too bad, & has been too bad for a long time, much worse than anybody can bear, & I begin to think it will never be fne again. This is a fnesse of mine, for I have often observed that if one writes about the Weather, it is generally completely changed before the Letter is read’. 2 Following a sentence which articulates—with the underscored ‘can’ and repeated ‘too bad’—a lament about miserable weather that seems to stretch beyond human endurance, Austen rapidly shifts to a more self- refexive and optimistic position, refecting on the changeability and unpredictability of the weather, as well as its capacity for radical localisa- tion: ‘when M r W. Digweed reaches Steventon tomorrow, he may fnd You have had a long series of hot, dry weather’. 3 Austen writes with ironic awareness that ‘bad’ weather in Chawton probably spells the same in Steventon, both locations in Hampshire and separated by only a few miles. A. Dale (*) Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, China