36 pages • 1 hour read
Jojo MoyesThe Last Letter From Your Lover
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
After the accident, Moira is cleaning up after the office Christmas party while Laurence sits drinking in his office. Moira goes in to offer Laurence a whisky, and they end up kissing and making love on his desk. When Laurence returns home, Jennifer is waiting in the drawing room, bags packed. She tells him that she is leaving as “this isn’t making either of us very happy” and that she loves someone else (198). Laurence reveals that he found a letter in her bag after the accident from her lover asking her to leave Laurence and to meet at the station. The memory and identity of her lover now starts to return to Jennifer. Laurence tells her that the man died in the car crash which injured her.
Chapter 11 Summary
Before the accident, Anthony meets with his wife and son, Phillip, to tell them he will be leaving for a new job in New York. He wants to continue communication with Phillip via letters but his wife, Clarissa, discourages him from doing so. Jennifer, having not seen Anthony since their evening at the club, finds a crucial letter from him. It says that he has resolved to leave for New York, and if she wants to join him, she should be at Paddington station at 7:15 p.m. on Friday. This forces Jennifer to make a final decision: “come with him, or remain where she was” (217). She is torn until she sees a golden dress on her bed that she wore when Anthony declined to sleep with her in France. This inspires her to choose Anthony. After quickly packing, she tries to get a cab to the station. Unable to find one, she rushes to the club Alberto’s and pleads with Felipe, the barman, to give her a lift. He agrees but is slightly drunk and crashes his car into a bus.
Chapter 12 Summary
It is the summer of 1964, roughly four years after Jennifer’s accident in 1960. She is visiting her friend Yvonne, who is pregnant with her third child, in the hospital. In that time, Jennifer’s life has in that time become dull and dominated by Laurence’s resentment about her affair. As she says, “he let her know, daily and in myriad ways, of her failures” including her household management, her choice of clothes, and her inability to make him happy (238). Still, she tries her best to play the role of a dutiful wife, even though she suspects he is having an affair. Her malaise is interrupted later when, at a party at the South African embassy, she sees Anthony.
Chapter 13 Summary
This chapter is told from Anthony’s perspective, just before the encounter with Jennifer in Chapter 12. It is four years after he left to work at the UN. He is temporarily back in London and is asking the executive editor of the Nation, Don Franklin, whether he can now go to work as a correspondent for the paper in the Congo, though it has become incredibly dangerous there. He passes on an offer of drinks with Don to meet a contact at the South African embassy. There, he meets Jennifer. She explains that everyone told her he died in the crash and that was the reason she hadn’t contacted him. He had thought it was because she “just didn’t want to come with me” (253).
Chapter 14 Summary
Anthony receives a message from Jennifer, delivered by the office secretary, telling him to meet her at his hotel. They have lunch together, and Anthony is frustrated by Jennifer’s inability to discuss anything other than trivialities. She leaves after only a short time. Later that day, however, Jennifer shows up at his hotel room. She reveals the depth of her feelings for him and how she grieved when she thought he was dead. They kiss and make love several times. Though Jennifer tells Anthony she loves him, she says they cannot meet again because she now has a young daughter to care for.
Chapter 15 Summary
Moira Parker is demoted from her job as Laurence’s personal assistant in favor of a younger woman. Jealous and wanting revenge, Moira approaches Jennifer while she is with her daughter in a park. She gives her a file containing information about people poisoned by asbestos who Laurence paid off and a letter by Anthony. This letter is dated several weeks after Jennifer’s accident and says that the opportunity for her to be with him in New York is still open. This reveals two things for Jennifer. First: Laurence had been deliberately intercepting letters from Anthony. Second: Laurence had known that Anthony was alive after the accident and deliberately fabricated the story that he was dead.
Incensed, Jennifer returns home and smashes up Laurence’s study with a golf club. She then confronts him at his office. She explains that she is leaving with their daughter to be with Anthony and that if he tries to stop her, she will make the files about asbestos public. Finally, she goes to the Nation to find Anthony. However, Don tells her he has already left for the Congo. She gives Don the file with her letters to Anthony, and it ends up in the library archives of the newspaper for the next 40 years.
Chapters 10-15 Analysis
After Laurence tells Jennifer that Anthony died in the car crash, he adds that he “could probably dig out the newspaper reports” (201). This is suspicious. A man who has just admitted to lying to her, is now incongruously talking about offering proof for her lover’s death. Yet Jennifer does not call his bluff and ask to see those reports. Moreover, she also makes no further enquiries on the topic or seek any independent verification for his claims. She blindly accepts the word of a man who would have a very strong motivation to lie to her despite the fact that she has no recollection of getting in the car with Anthony and the clear indication in the letter that she and Anthony would be travelling to the station separately. After all, why specify, “I’ll be at platform 4, Paddington, at 7.15” if you were going there together (201)?
This is not the only time she shows a striking naivete. Four years later, when she visits the offices of the Nation, she is told that Anthony has already left for the Congo. Once more she accepts a lie and the word of one man, without further questions. She does not consider the objective plausibility of the story. Would Anthony really travel to a deadly warzone so soon after meeting her? She does not reflect on Don’s possible motives for misleading her. Might Don see her as an unwelcome distraction to Anthony’s work that he wants rid of? Granted, Jennifer does try to track down Anthony in the Congo, albeit failing. Yet, given her love for him, she is surprisingly willing to accept false information that might permanently separate them.
What is the reason for this? And what is the reason why for four years after the crash, then 40 years after their brief reunion, she makes no independent effort either to contact Anthony, or verify if he genuinely had died or did not want to see her? A reporter at the UN for a major newspaper, and even a head librarian at one, cannot be that hard to find—even before the Internet. There are several answers to this question. Most unsatisfyingly, it might be possible to see Jennifer’s credulity here, and the inconsistency in her behavior, as the by-products of a need to grow dramatic tension. Jennifer must be naïve when it comes to stories about “Boot” so that they remain separated for most of the novel so their eventual re-unions can have maximal pathos. More charitably, Jennifer’s naivety can be viewed as a comment on the status, and nature, of women at the time. Unquestioningly accepting the word of her husband or a man in a position of authority might not come naturally for people today, but for a woman like Jennifer in the 1960s it may have been more likely.
Yet a more interesting and potentially deeper explanation lies with Jennifer’s strange relation to sexuality and romance. This goes back to her formative sexual experience, when she is beaten by her father for pursuing “the wrong boy” (137). Jennifer readily accepts the news of Anthony’s death and disappearance, then feels guilt for it, because she wants to be punished for defying the substitutive father, Laurence. This can be seen in the erotically charged language she uses in her first reaction to news of Boot’s death. She describes “a pain so sharp she felt as if she had been impaled” (202). And she later talks about how Laurence “punished me day after day, let me punish myself” (292).
As with the interplay of provocation and humiliation which grounds Jennifer’s and Anthony’s initial relationship, this masochism quickly becomes the fuel and excuse for her own sadism. This is evidenced in her reaction to news that Laurence had lied. She smashes up his study with a golf club, gaining a seemingly orgasmic pleasure in doing so, “her whole body […] beaded with sweat, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts” (290-91). She then proceeds to blackmail Laurence, threatening to ruin his life. Nor, of course, is Anthony exempted from this sadistic role reversal. She punishes him with the single experience of a sexual union which will then, she suggests, never be repeated. She says this is because of her parental responsibility. Just as likely is that this responsibility is pretext for a further act of sexual denial.
Related Titles
By Jojo Moyes
