AS THE FLOODWATERS ROSE around me and we sank in a summer of rain, I tried a kind of homeopathic charm; what books could I find on my shelves where floods and rain played a part? Perhaps my tempests-in-little would ward off the bigger deluge outside.

No doubt the cosmopolitan readers of Books will come up with a few of your own.

I began with the Mother of All Floods – the one sent by God, and only eight were saved. Tewkesbury can’t be the den of vice some claim, as most of the town has escaped. Reading the Genesis story, 40 days and 40 nights seems a bit excessive of God, now that we have seen the effects of one single 24 hours of rain falling like judgment.

In 1927 there were plenty of Southern pastors who declared the Mississippi River flood a judgment. The disaster prompted both Robert Frost’s poem The Flood – which isn’t very good – and inspired William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which is the wonderful, terrifying story of the Bundren family trying to bury their mother; not easy when the cart carrying the coffin is overturned as the river breaks its banks. But then, Chapter Five, the shortest chapter, in this, or any book, has already told us: “My mother is a fish.”

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has a marvellous description of a house being destroyed by flood. Twain, like Faulkner, was a Southern writer, and the Mississippi winds through their imaginations much as the Thames did through Dickens’s.

Peter Ackroyd has pointed out that in Dickens the Thames is a character, not a place or situation; and who can doubt it as Pip rows out to meet Magwitch, or as Gaffer Hexam pulls a body out of the black rain-beaten water, or Bill Sikes makes his way through the wet streets along the swollen river to meet Fagin at Saffron Hill?

Dickens’s London is always damp, as though the river got in everywhere, and could not be got out again. Bleak House begins in Holborn, where “there is as much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth”.

In Wuthering Heights, rain and storm are as necessary as the landscape itself, perhaps they are the landscape. Cathy’s death turns beginning-summer into downpour. Heathcliff is flood and tempest in human form.

Mary Shelley’s “monster” – the film version – is famously born in a thunderstorm that tears and drenches the land all around. The book contents itself with rain, but then proceeds to use the weather as a portent. The electric storms and howling cataracts of the Romantic imagination have made their way into every version of supernatural terror.

Susan Hill explains that weather is crucial to a good ghost story, and her The Woman in Black is soaked in malevolent waters of one kind or another. If time is a river, there is the question of what happens when it floods; much is washed away, but what might be returned? The body fished out of the river, as in Our Mutual Friend, leads backwards as well as forwards.

The Mill on the Floss has one of the most heartbreaking losses in literature, as Maggie and Tom are swept away by the floods, tangled in each other’s arms, “in an embrace never to be parted”. This line is then stolen and upended by E. F. Benson in his comic novel Mapp and Lucia, who find themselves flooded out to sea on Mapp’s kitchen table, and presumed dead – so much so that they are given a joint headstone with George Eliot’s famous lines on it – a matter of some indignation when they return home and dry.

I had a look at Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, which begins with life on the Ark. Maggie Gee’s The Flood is a prescient apocalypse story where it never stops raining. Graham Swift’s Waterland had to join my pile, as did the story I love of the Fox and the Gingerbread Man, who (if a gingerbread man can be counted as a “who”) accepts a ride across the river on the back of a wily fox, and ends up riding on his nose, as the river rises, only to be eaten in one final snap!

But, it was to Alice Oswald, and her beautiful long poem Dart, that I finally returned, after the sandbags had been laid at the front door. This poem follows the river in all its many voices, and floods the mind of the reader with every possibility of flow.

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