The Resilient Revival of Anne Brontë & Her Stones

For the first time, the Anne Brontë rock collection underwent complete description and identification, and along with Professor Hazel Hutchison of Leeds University and Dr. Enrique Lozano Diz at ELODIZ (a company specializing in spectroscopy analysis), an analysis of that collaboration, Anne Brontë and Geology: A Study of her Collection of Stones, was published in April 2022 in Volume 47, Issue 2 of the peer-reviewed journal, Brontë Studies & Gazette."

- L.A. SOKOLOWSKI

"You cannot expect stone to be as pliable as clay." - Anne Bronte 

No one would have accused Anne Brontë of being pliable. She was the youngest, after Charlotte and Emily, of the 19th-century English sibling creators of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Anne had a strong voice, and even stronger viewpoints, as an author and woman before tuberculosis claimed her life just shy of her 30th birthday in 1849.

Now the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and student Sally Jaspars have brought renewed attention to Anne Brontë and an astute collection of agates, carnelians, flowstone and red obsidian that suggest a woman - not much older than Jaspars herself -- who was an informed and skilled participant in the emerging science of geology just as it entered its golden age.

In 2022, Jaspars (no geologic pun intended), a student at the University of Aberdeen's Department of English, was studying Brontë when she kept noting the writer's references to books by well-known scientific and geologic authors, including in her most controversial work, The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. Written under the pseudonym, .

Acton Bell, Brontë's depiction of alcoholism, adultery and domestic abuse were considered unwholesome topics for women authors.

Also for the first time, a larger stone has been identified as speleothem flowstone or "frozen waterfall," a kind of calcium carbonate that forms, like stalagmites or stalactites, inside of caves. Her piece has no growth rings or banding, but it does have a rind on its exterior and ribbon-like folds terminating at each end in artificially cut surfaces."