Looking for Jane

Content Warning: This section discusses abortion.

“I have loved you with the deepest love in my heart, my darling. And so I know how hard it may have been for your Other Mother, for Margaret. Since I read her note, I have prayed every day for her forgiveness. I have taken care of her child, my child—our child—with tenderness.”

Angela finds Frances’s note to Nancy seven years after it was meant to be delivered. Realizing that the letter carries vital information, Angela decides to seek out Nancy, thus setting in motion one of the novel’s major plots. In the letter, Frances reflects on the empathy she feels for Maggie as a mother but also ruminates on the way their experiences diverged. This lays the groundwork for the theme of Motherhood as Both Universal and Personal.

“When Evelyn Taylor arrives at St. Agnes’s Home for Unwed Mothers, her first thought is that she’ll be lucky to make it out alive.”

This quote foreshadows Evelyn’s death at St. Agnes’s. It also introduces Evelyn’s character, though the “Evelyn” readers will know for most of the novel is not this woman. Her initial impression of St. Agnes’s is stark and dramatic, emphasizing the cruel, unwelcoming environment in which she and Maggie experience their pregnancies.

“‘But I need to tell you something,’ Dr. Gladstone says quietly. Nancy leans in to hear her. ‘If you, or a friend, or any other girl close to you ends up pregnant when they don’t want to be, you need to call around to doctors’ offices and ask for Jane.’”

This emergency room doctor is the first character to mention the Jane Network. She is secretive because of the danger of exposure, but this information comes in handy when Nancy needs to seek an abortion for herself later. This is the first instance of the name Jane, a repeated motif that relates not only to Bodily Autonomy and Reproductive Rights but also (via Maggie’s daughter, Jane) to the theme of motherhood.