Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene. Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Series. Albany: State University Press of New York. 2020. Pp. 334. $95.00 (cloth).

Shawna Ross. Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene. Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Series. Albany: State University Press of New York. 2020. Pp. 334. $95.00 (cloth).

In 1824, the three youngest members of the Brontë family were walking across the moors when “a torrent of peaty sludge” exploded outward in a surge of water, earth, and rocks that nearly drowned the children and certainly terrified their father (32). The Crow Hill Bog Burst, as it was called in the Leeds Mercury report that Shawna Ross suggests marks the first appearance of the Brontë children in public print, was both a geological effect and an ecological disaster. Cows and sheep were killed, homes were destroyed, and observers, including Patrick and Emily Brontë used the occurrence to meditate in sermon and poem on the fragile imbrication of human lives and natural environments that the moors imposed. For Ross, the burst has another resonance: as “one of the earliest moments in which the [Brontë] family's history intersects with the Anthropocene” (47). In the tour de force history of the burst and its aftermath that occupies the first chapter of Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene, Ross finds in the event all the crucial elements that shape her monograph's argument more generally. The anthropogenic interventions—“[m]oors, after all, are human environments,” she reminds us (52, original emphasis)—and the difficulty of limiting the damaging effects of those interventions, the temporal counterpoint of the deep geological time that made the moors with the sudden catastrophe of the burst, and above all the melancholic capacity of...