The Weather Woman is the children’s writer Sally Gardner’s first novel for adults under her own name (previously, she used the pseudonym Wray Delaney). Spanning the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, the story describes an England trembling at the French Revolution and haunted by the threat of Napoleon while aristocrats gamble and roister. Gardner’s sense of atmosphere is acute. The frost fairs, the grand ballrooms, the stinking alleyways all come alive.
The novel’s major theme is the subjugation of women; its secondary, the border between rationality and intuition. Our thoughtful, unconventional heroine is Neva Tarshin. Her mother, a genius chess player, was forced to hide her talents, only playing as a wayside attraction, disguised as an automated bear. Having set up a booth on the frozen Thames, Neva’s parents are killed when the river suddenly thaws, and the strange little girl is adopted by a Russian clockmaker, Victor Friezland. She knows she is not destined to sit ‘demurely at her needlework’.
Neva has a special talent: she can predict the weather far into the future, down to the very minute. The world will never accept her as she is, partly because she’s a woman and partly because science and reason can’t understand her power. So she and her adoptive father construct an automaton: the Weather Woman. As the prophecies must disguise themselves as scientific measurements, so Neva must disguise herself as a blue-spectacled man called Eugene Jonas in order to enter places women can’t go, attending lectures and even passing into the hallowed halls of Brooks’s club.
There is no simplistic dichotomy between masculine reason and feminine intuition, however. Casting a villainous gloom is the passionate Lord Wardell, who loses his fortune on one of Neva’s predictions.
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