My introduction begins with Dorothy Richardson who, in the second volume of Pilgrimage, gives us a scene straight out of Jane Austen, which she then quickly abandons. Richardson’s particular form of modernism, I suggest, requires an engagement with realism in order to foreground its own interests. Using Richardson as a jumping off point, I outline the way modernism’s earliest critics reproduced arguments from the modernists themselves that emphasized their distinction from their realist predecessors. This debate then carried over to the seminal Marxist arguments of the 1930s between Lukács and Adorno, through which the terms modernism and realism hardened into an opposition that is still with us today. This reified divide cannot be simply wished away: we can still meaningfully distinguish works dominated by a realist impulse from those that use modernist’s characteristic disruptions. What we cannot do, I argue, is: (1) array these two movements simplistically via a false divide between form and content; (2) draw a straight line between politics and form. Instead, we must look to the ways in which specific aesthetic techniques combine to produce the form of each particular work of art.

This chapter examines Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–1938), and selections of non-fiction writing by Virginia Woolf published between 1919 and 1925. It argues that the fluid psychology we traditionally associate with twentieth-century experiments in literary form begins with the impact of nineteenth-century climate science on realist fiction. The atmospheric modes of female consciousness and ethereal embodiment that women’s presumed sensitivity to climate engenders in novels like Jane Eyre and Bleak House thus give rise to later, feminist engagements with female authorship such as Richardson’s and Woolf’s. Taking May Sinclair’s pioneering use of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe Pilgrimage in 1918 as a pivot point, the chapter connects Richardson’s acknowledged debt to Villette with the climatic underpinnings that inform Woolf’s responses to both of these novels as well as her famous definition of modern fiction as ‘an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.