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 21-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary
Ellie has just returned home from her meeting with Jennifer and is reflecting on her relationship with John. In contrast to the passionate and soul bearing letters Jennifer received from Anthony she gets only the odd one-line text and “a host of noncommittal emails” (396). Sinking into a mood of self-pity and encouraged by several glasses of wine, she sends John an emotional text: “Please call. Just once. Need to hear from you. X” (396). Rory unexpectedly knocks on her door, asking if she’d like to go for a drink. She is too tired to go out, so he makes her a cup of tea instead and reads some of Anthony’s letters out loud to her. Rory then kisses her, and they have sex.
The next morning Ellie goes out to get coffee and croissants for them both. When she returns, Rory is getting dressed and leaving. He heard a message from John on the answering machine responding to Ellie’s earlier text. Rory says he doesn’t want to see someone who is sleeping with another person.
Chapter 22 Summary
Ellie sends an email to a man named Phillip O’Hare of The Times, hoping he is the son of Anthony O’Hare.
She is given a tour of the Nation’s new offices with her coworkers and is told she won’t have her own desk. This shows how low her stock has fallen at work and the importance of being able to track down Anthony and complete her story. She gets a message from John, saying that he misses. Ellie expresses reservations to Melissa about publishing Anthony’s letters to Jennifer due to concerns about his privacy.
After work, she follows Rory to an underground station and asks if he wants a drink. He is still angry with her, however, because he knows Ellie is sleeping with a married man, and he has been cheated on before himself. As he says, “I was on the other side […] I loved someone who found someone else that she couldn’t resist” (418). She also gets a message from John’s phone which implies that he loves her.
Chapter 23 Summary
Ellie meets up again with Jennifer who tells her about her failed effort to reach Congo and how she has not heard from Anthony since, despite leaving the P.O. box open for the past four decades. She assumed that he died in the Congo or was too hurt by her to want to get in touch.
Later, Ellie thinks she is meeting John at a restaurant. Instead, she is confronted by John’s wife, Jessica. Jessica reveals that she stole John’s phone while on holiday and has been impersonating John ever since. This explains why he has seemed to be more communicative and open to expressing his feelings. Before leaving, she tells Ellie about the anxiety that discovering her husband’s affair has caused her. Back at work, Phillip O’ Hare gets in touch with Ellie and asks her to call him. Phillip explains that Anthony is indeed his father and has been working in the library of the Nation for the past 40 years.
Chapter 24 Summary
It is 1964, just after Jennifer has left Laurence. This chapter explains how Anthony ended up in the library. After being rejected by Jennifer in his hotel, Anthony had not in fact gone to the Congo. Crushed by her rejection, he had hospitalized himself with drink. Don lied to Jennifer to protect Anthony from the damage he thought Anthony and Jennifer’s involvement with each other was causing Anthony. Don did not give Anthony Jennifer’s last letter to him.
After the hospital, Anthony goes to stay with Don and his wife. He then prepares to truly travel to the Congo. These plans change when his now-teenage son, Phillip, shows up at the office and wants to stay with him because his mother is dying of cancer. Don tries to give Anthony an easy job writing on the newspaper. However, Anthony finds he is unable to write anything, so he begins working in the archives.
Chapter 25 Summary
In 2003, Ellie finishes writing her article, staying up all night and handing it to Melissa first thing in the morning. She explains that the man who wrote the love letters, Anthony O’ Hare, is in fact the chief librarian at the Nation who is now retiring. Ellie meets John in a café and ends their relationship. She has realized that they both want different things and that he is not serious about her. Later, she goes to the library and returns the love letters to Anthony O’ Hare. She also tells him that Jennifer left her husband in 1964 and had come to the office to try and be with him. She gives Anthony the P.O. box address by which he can now contact Jennifer.
Chapter 26 Summary
Anthony writers Jennifer a letter. She responds, they exchange more letters, and they agree to meet in Postman’s Park. They finally see each other again after 40 years and the possibility of a future relationship between them is established. Ellie’s career has taken off, and she goes to see Rory, who is packing to travel to Peru. He invites her in for coffee, and she asks if he will write to her while he is away.
Chapters 21-26 Analysis
When Anthony and Jennifer reunite in Postman’s Park, “Anthony’s own hand lifts and presses her palm against his skin” (486). Letters help bring them back together, first through Ellie’s discovery of their old letters and efforts to contact the pair and then by the later letters which reaffirm their feelings and arrange the meeting. At the same time, words and letters are now not necessary. The epistolary relationship which previously defined their relationship was predicated on absence and separation. It has now been supplanted by full physical presence, symbolized by the touching of skin. The same is true of Ellie. Her relation to John, continued through text messages which allowed for mutual misunderstanding, is ostensibly replaced by the more straightforward face-to-face romance with Rory. This can be seen at the end of the novel when Ellie heeds Anthony’s advice, to not send Rory a letter, but see him “in person” (480).
In this way, letters have served their purpose. They are important symbolically and instrumentally for the protagonists and help create the tension out of which their romances can grow. But ultimately, they can politely and definitively step aside when the fully present, relationships begin. Yet can things be so simple? While some aspects of the novel’s end encourage this benign view of letters (including Elle’s success with her article) other elements suggest otherwise. The first intimation of this is given in the encounter between Ellie and John’s wife, Jessica. She had used text messages to pose as John and lure Ellie into a humiliating confrontation. Granted, this has the effect of helping Ellie to end things with John. One might also add that the problem was not with written communication per se, but its misuse, then abuse, by John then Jessica. Still, it hints at a more problematic reality for letters, one where letters cannot so easily be disentangled, or cast aside, from the identities or romances which they originally served.
The first sexual encounter between Rory and Ellie offers further complications. At first when Rory calls on her, she is lukewarm towards him. As she says, “Rory isn’t John, but it has been some compensation to have a man to call on for the odd evening out” (398). It is only when he starts reading aloud the love letters from Anthony to Jennifer that her attitude changes. She “imagines how Jennifer must have felt to be loved, adored, wanted” (400). This prefigures and instigates their having sex. It is Rory’s adoption of the role of Anthony, through his letters, which sparks her desire for him. Their spark is also bound up with Ellie imagining herself in the role of Jennifer.
Roleplaying is often a part of sexual flirtation, as is the playful adoption of different personas and identities. Further, the letter reading could just suggest that Rory is fun and attentive to her interests (for the moment, the letters). Yet several other points indicate that more is going on. For a start, the letter reading occurs in a serious, sentimental, context, with Ellie, “crying so hard her words are nearly unintelligible” (399). There is little indication of play, humor, or irony here. Second, the preoccupation with letters extends beyond this specific sexual encounter. When Ellie goes to meet Rory, before his trip to Peru, it is because she “wanted to know […] if you might write to me” (488). Ellie is trying to recreate for herself Jennifer’s romance and transform Rory into a young Anthony, the absent, epistolary lover.
In this sense, she has become trapped. While the real Jennifer and Anthony have, as far as we know, moved beyond the seductive but ultimately life-denying sadomasochistic dynamic of the epistolary relationship, Ellie is at the risk of repeating their earlier fate of near-perpetual separation from the beloved. Rather than travel with Rory or ask him to stay, she asks for communication through distance. Identifying strongly with Anthony and Jennifer, Ellie remains enthralled by distanced and the past. It is unclear whether she will find—and embrace—love of her own.
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