The window of my study looks into the backyard, which slopes downhill to my wife’s pottery studio, hidden by various trees and shrubs that have been keening under rain and eternal clouds for way too many days now. I remember sitting on a screened porch forty-some years ago with a girl who said, “I think whenever it rains, you can remember every time it’s ever rained.” Of course we didn’t have as much rain to remember then.

And there are rainy-day scenes to remember from our favorite novels and poems. There’s the opening of Jane Eyre, with her sitting on the window ledge, as far as possible from the unloving relatives within, gazing out at an uninviting, blustery day. I’ve always felt that James Joyce’s placement of Eveline at her window, in the story bearing her name, owes something to Bronte. Ditto Hemingway’s use of the window and the rain (confining an incompatible couple to their hotel room) in Cat in the Rain. And who can forget the last paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, where the hero walks back to his hotel in the rain after saying goodbye to the body of his dead lover? And what about that storm in King Lear, which seems to mark the rending of the entire moral order?

What are your favorite rainy days from literature?

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