The Last Letter From Your Lover

The Last Letter from Your Lover is a 2010 romance novel by British journalist and writer Jojo Moyes. It centers on the interconnected lives and romances of two women living in London at different times. The first, Ellie Haworth, is a journalist in 2003 who comes across a set of love letters while researching the 1960s. The letters tell the story of Jennifer Stirling, the wife of a wealthy industrialist, and her intense affair with troubled foreign correspondent, Anthony O’Hare. Despite their love, circumstances and social convention conspire to keep them apart. Using the letters, Ellie tracks down Jennifer and Anthony in 2003, and the lovers reunite after not seeing each other for 40 years.

This guide uses the Hodder Paperbacks edition published in 2011.

Plot Summary

The Last Letter from Your Lover contains four interrelated narrative threads from different moments in time: 1960, 1964, and 2003. While the novel jumps back and forth between these, this summary will, for clarity’s sake, describe events in chronological order. Chapter summaries can be consulted for their exact ordering in the novel. This guide is divided into five analysis sections, each covering between five and six of the novel’s 26 chapters. Each chapter is also prefaced by a romantic message, not directly connected to the plot or characters in the novel’s narrative.

In 1960, a journalist, Anthony O’Hare, fresh from reporting on conflict in the Congo is sent to interview industrialist Laurence Stirling. He travels to the French Riviera where, after interviewing Laurence, he is invited back to his house for dinner, where he meets Jennifer Stirling. At the meal he gets drunk, and Jennifer overhears him insulting her when he is walking home with another guest. Anthony writes a letter of apology and asks her out for lunch. A four-day romance between the two begins, culminating in Jennifer trying to initiate sex with Anthony in his hotel, which he rejects. After they both return to London, Anthony writes, and they meet again in a park and kiss. Exchanging letters, and seeing each other intermittently, for the next five weeks, they end up having sex in a club’s cloakroom. Anthony asks Jennifer to leave Laurence, but she refuses. Anthony then gives her an ultimatum in a letter: She can either come with him and start a new life in New York, or never see him again. Jennifer decides at the last minute to go and meet him at the station, but gets into in a car accident on the way.

Jennifer wakes up in hospital and cannot remember anything. Her husband, who found out about her affair from a letter left in her bag after the accident, uses Jennifer’s amnesia to reset their lives. However, this plan is upset when Jennifer starts discovering some of Anthony’s letters hidden around the house. Although she cannot remember who Anthony is, she realizes that she was in love with the letters’ author, not her husband. This leads her, after kissing another man at Laurence’s office Christmas party, to try and leave Laurence. He lies and tells Jennifer that her lover died in the car crash that injured her, something which also brings the memory of Anthony back. Overcome by guilt, and the thought that he is gone forever, she stays with Laurence for the next four years.

Back from New York, Anthony sees Jennifer at a London party. They meet and have sex, although Jennifer says that she cannot leave Laurence as she now has a daughter. Jennifer then discovers, through Laurence’s secretary, that Laurence had known that Anthony was alive and had intercepted letters from Anthony asking her to join him after he had left for New York. Jennifer leaves Laurence but is told by Anthony’s boss at the Nation that he had gone to the Congo. In fact, he had hospitalized himself through drink. After attempting to reach the Congo, Jennifer stops looking for Anthony and assumes that he is either dead or does not want to see her.

In 2003, Ellie, a journalist researching attitudes of women in the 1960s, chances upon the letters between Anthony and Jennifer. This leads her to find the authors of the letters, one of whom, Anthony, was in fact the head librarian of the newspaper she works for. She helps organize a reunion between Jennifer and Anthony. The article she writes on this story helps save her career and allows for a deeper understanding of her own relationships. She abandons the married man who is not fully committed to her and establishes a correspondence with the more loving Rory, a librarian who is heading to South America.