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 lyric and narrative writing to delineate these associations for readers. Like her equally powerful conclusion, which traces the presence of the humble native flower, the bluebell, through writing and editing by the Brontë family to examine the devastations of human loss, Ross's accomplished interdisciplinarity in this first chapter shows all the strengths of the author's approach to studying the Anthropocene as a literary critic.

Though neither bog burst nor bluebell chapter particularly conforms to the confines of the single-author monograph suggested by Ross's title, both are necessary to situate Charlotte Brontë's work as a local, reactive, singular response to accounts of the nonhuman world sourced across a broader range of family writings. This, as Ross points out, is not unlike the work of documenting the Anthropocene itself. While Ross's three main chapters focus specifically on Brontë's novels, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette, their arguments continue to draw from the lessons of the bog burst. As Ross argues, the burst, and more generally the dawning awareness of the crises inevitably resulting from humankind's natural involvements on the moors, allow Brontë to “witness, survive, respond to, and write about anthropogenic devastation in ways that are both ethically and aesthetically productive” (89). Ross's analysis is most intriguing when it follows Brontë's own lines of inquiry, attending to the ways that questions about Thornfield Hall or the town of Villette also teased out the preconditions of anthropogenic influence and devastation. Ross's scholarly effort is expended not so much in adjudicating the boundaries of the Anthropocene era but rather in demonstrating methodologies whereby literary scholars can use the tools of their discipline to address the Anthropocene's disruptions. “Charlotte Brontë wrote the Anthropocene at the scale of a lifetime” (5), Ross asserts, and her focus on Stacey Alaimo and other theorists’ attention to the provocations, embodiments, and materialities of feminist Anthropocene theory productively reroutes discussion away from technoscientific debates. Working roughly across the continuums of human/nonhuman and past/future, Ross charts the formal work of the novel along each axis to demonstrate the internal contradictions, tensions, and reversals inherent to the overall narrative's account of its female heroine.

Though certainly all of Charlotte Brontë's novels contain these same vexed responses to anthropogenic intervention, the structure of the monograph demands that each chapter focus its attention slightly differently. Chapter 2 turns our attention toward the boundaries of the human and Jane's stubborn adherence to the Anthropocene malady of “corporeal exceptionalism” (33). Centering this chapter's reading of the novel on the turning point of Jane's flight from Thornfield to Marsh House allows Ross to point out the essential conservatism of Jane's journey, spurning as it does the potential liberations from human traditions and constraints that the moors might allow. As Ross shows, this “feminist bid for freedom” also embeds an “oppositional model of humanity” that pits the human against the hybrid and non-human, denying the latter liberations afforded to the former and so forestalling urgent environmental change. In chapter 3 Ross shifts attention from definitions of the human to the processes of “storytelling the Anthropocene” (34) and shows how the novel Shirley is both simply “a problem” (161) and also “a demonstration of the necessity of forging new methods of telling stories about, and thriving in, the Anthropocene” (163). The novel's problematic nature is directly a result of its need to find new ways of telling environmental ethnographies, Ross explains, demonstrating through its supposed narrative inconsistencies the multiplicities of Anthropocene narrative witnessing. And chapter 4 finds a resonant biological term for Villette's Lucy Snowe—she is oligotropic, capable of “thriv[ing] in unpropitious conditions and without ample resources” (35)—while also locating her within narrative theory. Lucy, “archetypal mourner” (223), can be termed at once a Gothic and an Anthropocenic heroine, as both character types must confront “the sudden disclosure of past human actions that erupt, causing sudden catastrophes” (249). Ross traces this technique of “delayed identification” (250) in both the postnatural ecology of Villette the urban, artificial town and the post-Holocene temporization of Villette the novel, defiant of resolution.

Though it is specifically Villette that Ross calls a document of what it is like to “live after the beginning of the end of the world” (274), such an assessment certainly characterizes Charlotte Brontë's writings more broadly as well. Or as Ross puts it, “What Charlotte's total body of work offers is a halting but inexorable transition into a postnatural world” (280). It is a transition that profoundly, tragically depends on her repeated losses, including, eventually, the three younger siblings walking across the moor the day of the bog burst in 1824. It is with great pleasure but also profound and perpetual sadness that we follow Ross through Brontë's literary mourning and memorialization of these losses.