“Set the winter at defiance”: Emily Montague’s Weather Reports and Political Sensibility

This article examines the political significance of the detailed descriptions of Canada’s very cold weather in Frances Brooke’s epistolary novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769). In 1769, public sphere debate about Canada was focused on the difficulty of displacing French Catholic loyalties among new British subjects. By using the same terms to describe the effects of the weather on her British protagonists and the effects of French Catholic influence on the new subjects these travellers hope to convert to British values, Brooke identifies French Catholic “coldness of character” as a serious threat to the British project to cultivate affection in these colonists. By the novel’s end, however, Brooke’s protagonists also model a willingness to enjoy the weather’s influence that aligns assimilating to British values with improvements in sensibility, rather than conflict. I conclude that tracking this change in Brooke’s characters’ writing about the weather casts new light on Emily Montague’s contribution to an important mid-century debate about how Britain would imagine and manage the increasingly diverse environments of its empire.