'Under a Benign Sky'

The Moons of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Harvest Moon, 1891, George Inness | National Gallery of Art, London

This essay was originally published February 4, 2025

If you’ve been reading Symbolism & Structure for a while, you know I’m an adherent to A. Stuart Daley’s “A Chronology of Wuthering Heights.” I became enthralled with his (1970s) research into whether or not Brontë used calendars and almanacs to construct her novel.

On the morning I was born, the moon was 15.41 days old and 100% illuminated with a tilt of 53.172°—a waning gibbous. A Cancerian Moon Child, am I; I have always been drawn to the moon. You can understand how this line of research interests me.

First I read, “The Moons and Almanacs of Wuthering Heights,” which introduced me to Daley’s research—in it, he re-examines (and contributes to) Charles Percy Sanger’s still-relatively undisputed chronology, “The Structure of Wuthering Heights (1926).”¹

When I bought my second-hand copy of the Norton 3rd Edition of Wuthering Heights, I discovered Daley’s chronology of the novel. Using those details, I sometimes reference specific dates in my essays (and on Notes). But…how did Daley assign dates to Brontë’s narrative?

Emily Brontë’s Harvest Moons & Childhood Almanacs

What Daley observed in his research is that the action—its chronology—depicted by Brontë in Wuthering Heights, concurs with the Harvest Moon and specifically, to two years of Emily Jane’s childhood—those of 1826 and 1827.

Consulting almanacs he was able to identify the concurrence of whole weeks or months, moon cycles, sunsets, ember days and movable feasts!

Isn’t that fascinating?

A. Stuart Daley proposed and proved three explanations for the chronological basis of Wuthering Heights. These are all widely accepted (and in my opinion, likely true).

First, he determined the dates of the Harvest Moons and using other lunar data served to establish control points in Brontë’s chronology; he was then able to accurately date many (if not all) major incidents in the novel.

These sequences take place under a Harvest Moon:

The return of Heathcliff, a death and an abduction, and the final scene of the novel, which takes place, “under a benign sky,” in September of 1802.

Second, after the Harvest Moons of Brontë’s fictive 1801 and 1802 could not actually be reconciled, he identified—using other chronological data—five specific dates from five narrative blocks or sequences which likely held importance for Emily Jane.

The moons, he discovered, were representative of 1826 and 1827, the years in which Charlotte and Emily Brontë created their beloved Young Men and Our Fellows plays. Daley wrote:

Perhaps it is impossible to determine what these years, 1826 and 1827, meant to Emily Brontë that she seems to have used their clocks and moons, consciously or subconsciously, as the chronometers for navigating the worlds of her imagination.

Emily Jane, after Charlotte left for Roe Head, may have preserved the almanacs from 1826 and 1827. Perhaps she kept them for sentimental reasons or, convenience? Daley, in his research, surmised that she may have used them to construct the elaborate time sequences for her narratives.

Finally, Daley linked Brontë’s use of that 1826 and 1827 moon lore in Wuthering Heights with lunar fixations in her Gondal poems. He found a seasonal concentration, too!

A cursory inspection of Emily’s poetry reveals more than a score of allusions to the moon and moonlight. Several of them relate to the autumn season.

In his article, “The Moons and Almanacs of Wuthering Heights,” Daley reminds us that Miss Fannie Ratchford recognized, during her examination of Emily Jane’s poetry:

“I had evidence…that, notwithstanding the growing and perhaps shifting nature of the Gondal creation, Emily was working out an over-all design comparable to the clear-cut blueprint of Wuthering Heights.”

A. Stuart Daley’s examination of Wuthering Heights fascinates me. His close reading of Wuthering Heights, Brontë’s use of lunar behavior and moonlore inspired this Substack:

“Whatever other functions they may serve in the novel’s symbolisms and structure,” he wrote, “these moons afford dates for testing the novel’s chronology and therefore they can help to clear the ground for a systematic study of it.”

If I refer to the date of an event here on Symbolism & Structure, it comes from Daley’s chronology. If you’d like to read more, visit the JSTOR button above and register for a FREE account through your local library, university or by using your Google account.

1. The chronology of Wuthering Heights has been studied successively by C.P. Sanger, Charles Travis Clay, S. A. Power and A. Stuart Daley, with some minor additions, by Inga-Stina Ewbank. (The Birth of Wuthering Heights, Edward Chitham). All quotes used in this essay come from A. Stuart Daley, unless otherwise noted.

Cover Image: Harvest Moon, circa 1880s, Charles Harold Davis (1856-1933)