36 pages • 1 hour read
The Last Letter From Your Lover
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Themes
Friendship and Romantic Advice
Family plays a minimal role in The Last Letter from Your Lover. Neither Ellie nor Jennifer has siblings and, except for the significant story about Jennifer’s father thrashing her, parents barely appear. This is summed up by Ellie’s mother’s birthday email to her. The only time she is given a voice in the novel, it is to express the banality that, “the dog is doing well after having his hip replaced” (321). Friends, however, are central in the lives of both Ellie and Jennifer. They are second only in importance to lovers and are a main source of moral and existential advice. So, what is it that they say?
Jennifer’s friends represent the voices of convention. When recovering from amnesia and feeling alienated from life, Yvonne and Violet provide the context by which she can return to and accept middle-class normality. Drinks, dinner parties, and light conversation are there to discourage “fretting” over the past, easing her back into a socially acceptable way of being (46). Deeper questions are brushed aside. As Jennifer starts defying this, flirting with one of Yvonne’s cousins, this mask starts to slip. Yvonne makes it clear that she is upsetting her husband and that this will not be tolerated. When, four years later, Jennifer tells Yvonne that she has left Laurence, Yvonne’s response is more emphatic. She is accused of “moral degeneracy” (381). When she will not step into line and return to Laurence, Jennifer is ostracized.
By contrast, Ellie’s friends are not quite so judgmental or uncompromising. Douglas voices his disapproval about her having an affair with a married man, but they are generally less concerned with the moral or social order and more with her wellbeing. This is seen by Nicky’s response on reading John’s birthday text message to Ellie. As she says, Jennifer “shouldn’t have to decipher crappy halfway-house messages from some half-baked boyfriend” (320). Moral and social policing has given way to platonic paternalism. Yet the problem is that Ellie cannot or will not listen. She ignores their good advice until the confrontation with John’s wife makes it unavoidable.
At the other extreme, Anthony’s friend (and editor) Don takes matters into his own hands. Don acts out of good intentions when he lies to Jennifer about Anthony’s whereabouts and does not mention her appearance at the office to him. He has just seen his friend nearly die of alcohol abuse and worries that Jennifer is a trigger. The issue, though, is that he does not consider whether he has the right to make the decision about the lives of two adults. Further, seeing only the negative impact of Jennifer, he does not reflect on the positive joy she might bring to Anthony. The irony is that despite his meddling, he is a true friend. He saves Anthony’s job and invites him into his house when Anthony is at his lowest.
Romance and the Sexual Revolution
When Anthony returns to London in 1964, he notices significant change. Along with new shops, foreign restaurants, and high-rise towers he sees “girls in short skirts” who “eye him speculatively” and secretaries winking at him (245). He is observing the first manifestations of the sexual revolution. This involved a liberalization of attitudes beginning in the 1960s towards sex and sexuality and a growing recognition that sex occurred outside the bonds of monogamous, heterosexual marriage. With the widespread availability of contraceptives like the pill, the sexual revolution ushered in a new era of freedom and openness especially for white, western women.
Forty years later, the effects of this on Ellie’s life are noticeable. She is part of a generation who can “drink hard, party hard” and enjoy casual, extra-marital, sex, with minimal risk or effort (317). Further, while some of her peers are getting married or having children, these are no longer obligations or social necessities, which allows Ellie to assign both, as she says, “to the folder of things she would do later in life” (354). Does Moyes view this change positively? In many ways, yes. Ellie enjoys choices which women of Jennifer’s generation simply did not have. She can pursue a career, live, and socialize with whomever she wants and explore sex and her sexuality with more than one partner. Moreover, she will not be accused of being “extraordinarily selfish” or immoral if she does so (381).
However, the novel also suggests that something has been lost. This is expressed when Ellie asks Rory, referring to Anthony’s letters, “why do you think nobody write love letters like these anymore?” (351) The problem is not merely or only that the means of romantic communication have changed. It is not just that telephones, emails, text messaging, and dating apps have made letters redundant. It is that these technologies have arisen in response to and further fuel, a different type of romantic interaction, one based on speed, efficiency, and anonymity. The very thing the sexual revolution promised—choice, freedom—has at the same time cheapened the meaning of the things chosen. When you can have whatever you want, do you ever want what you have?
Secrets and Exposure
As Anthony is about to make love to Jennifer in the club, he observes the expression of desire on her face and contrasts that with the look of mere tolerance some women have when having sex with their husbands. He imagines them thinking, “yes, all right, dear, if you really want to” (183). In this way, and as throughout the novel, sexual desire is often viewed as incompatible with marriage. Why is this? What is so exciting about an affair? On a superficial level it is possible to think about this in terms of, as Jennifer puts it, “the terrifying, irrevocable pull of someone forbidden” (364-65). Combined with the banality of married life, affairs provide both novelty and the thrill of doing something illicit. We want what we are told we cannot have, and there are few things more forbidden, especially in Jennifer’s day, than cheating on one’s husband or sleeping with another man’s wife.
Yet, the novel suggests there is more to it than that. The excitement of the affair is, as with so many things in the novel, bound up with the act of writing and reading letters. In contrast to public speech, the love letter is the artifact of something personal, intimate, and hidden from others. In the context of an affair, the letter represents both concealment and exposure, a simultaneous source of excitement and potential shame. Affairs also invite and implicitly involve (particularly when using illicit messages) the thrills of exhibitionism and voyeurism. In a literal sense, this is seen in a story Yvonne tells about the husband one of her friends. Ostensibly to speed up a divorce, “he’s agreed to be ‘caught’ in a hotel with some woman” and photographed (232-33). It seems he is intentionally organizing the public exposure of himself and his affair.
On a more symbolic level, the idea of exposure is also seen through the actions of Jennifer in relation to her letters: She leaves them at the offices of a newspaper and then agrees to have them published 40 years later. In the first instance, she hopes that someone will read them. This person is, of course Ellie, who gets the voyeur’s thrill of looking into another’s affair, and, in a sense, seeing Jennifer and Anthony exposed. In the second instance, it is with the grander intention of allowing everyone to read them. This is the more full-blooded exhibitionist fantasy of total exposure, of being able to, as Rory puts it, “air her dirty linen in public” (348).
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