50 pages • 1 hour read
JP DelaneyThe Girl Before
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A 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 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.”
The novel opens in the past, as Emma and her boyfriend, Simon, tour an apartment with a leasing agent. Emma doesn’t like this particular location because it is too prone to possible crimes, and it is revealed that she has recently been the victim of a violent home break-in. The novel shifts to Jane’s perspective in the present. Jane, too, is touring apartments with a leasing agent, and is unhappy with the options she has been presented. Both Jane and Emma are told, separately, that they could possibly be candidates to apply to live at One Folgate Street.
The novel continues to switch back and forth from Emma’s story, in the past, and Jane’s story, in the present, as they experience almost parallel events. Each woman tours One Folgate Street, marveling at the “cream-colored stone” (12) and the windows that “flood the inside with light” (11). Emma expresses feeling particularly safe in the isolating space of the home, while Simon comments on the prison-like atmosphere.
In order to live at One Folgate Street, tenants must agree to a lengthy list of conditions. Upon hearing the terms paraphrased by her agent, Emma agrees that she can commit to making this “big change” (16). Similarly, while Jane wrestles with her decision, she eventually decides that it might be worth it to live in a space that has such “integrity” (18).
As Emma begins to fill out her application to One Folgate Street, which has thirty-five personally-focused questions, she describes her relationship with Simon. After meeting at a wedding, the relationship developed quickly, and they moved in with each other after a few weeks. Emma starts to reflect on how One Folgate Street might “turn [Emma] into a better person,” bringing “order and discipline to the random chaos of [her] life” (21). Emma decides to leave the first question, which is also the chapter title, blank; when Simon questions her decision, she explains that they can put any “essential items” into storage, causing an argument.
Jane’s reaction to the application for One Folgate Street continues to prompt her focus on the idea that the house might facilitate integrity. As she reads the questions, she investigates The Monkford Partnership, the architecture firm who built One Folgate Street, and learns more about Edward Monkford, the architect, whose wife and child were killed while he was building the property. Jane describes her own traumatic loss of giving birth to a stillborn daughter, Isabel.
As Chapter 1 concludes, Emma goes to her therapist, Carol, and processes the trauma of the break-in. It’s also revealed that Emma has a latent eating disorder. Jane, in the present, finds herself more engaged in the application process, and the chapter closes on her hoping to be accepted for this “rebirth” (36).
Chapter 2 Summary: “When I’m working on something, I can’t relax until it’s perfect. Agree . . . . . Disagree”
Chapter 2 begins again with Emma narrating from the past, as she and Simon are invited to interview for One Folgate Street. Upon meeting Edward Monkford in person, Emma focuses on the fact that “he’s attractive […] like a sexy, relaxed schoolteacher” (41), while Simon seems intent on impressing Edward. Edward, though, seems only interested in Emma, and chastises Simon’s rude behavior after Emma spills some coffee, saying, “Never apologize for someone you love” (43).
When Jane meets Edward Monkford for her interview for One Folgate Street, she responds similarly to Emma, concluding “I would sleep with this man” (45) after watching him calmly respond to an angry client. During the interview, Edward explains how the house collects metadata on the users. At the end of her interview, Jane also has the opportunity to meet Edward’s technology partner, David Thiel.
Chapter 2 concludes with a short narrative from Emma, who has just received the email that their “application is approved” (47). She calls the agent to tell him that she and Simon will accept, and he informs her that they can move in that weekend.
Chapter 3 Summary: “You are involved in a traffic accident that you know is your fault. The other driver is confused and seems to think she caused the crash. Do you tell the police it was her fault or yours? —Her Fault / —Your Fault”
After moving into One Folgate Street, Jane begins to experiment with the different features of the home, like “Housekeeper,” which tracks things like the weather, her laundry, and what food to cook. After several bouquets of lilies are delivered to Jane’s doorstep, Jane calls the florist, who says they haven’t delivered anything to that address. On the next day, “when more lilies arrive,” Jane finds a card in them, “on which someone has written: Emma, I will love you forever. Sleep well, my darling” (53). Later, after inviting her friends over for a luncheon, Jane discovers the person who has been putting the lilies on the doorstep is a man who is “maybe a couple of years older, his dark hair prematurely flecked with gray” (59). When Jane probes him as to why he is leaving the flowers, he says, “She was murdered […] First he poisoned her mind, then he killed her” (59). Then the man leaves.
In their first weeks at One Folgate Street, Simon and Emma throw a party. At the end of the night, Simon asks to have sex, and Emma says, “I don’t think I want to […] not yet” (56). In the morning, the two detectives managing Emma’s break-in case find her to discuss video material they discovered on a cell phone, which depicts her involved in a violent sexual act with a man. Emma confesses, in front of Simon, that she was forced into this act. One of the police officers, DI Clarke, reassures Emma that they will work to prosecute the man, Deon Nelson. When the officers leave, Simon is angry with Emma for not telling him.
Chapter 3 concludes with Jane researching the person named Emma who might have lived at One Folgate Street. Jane discovers an article that describes that Emma Matthews’s body “was found at the bottom of an open, uncarpeted staircase” (66). Shortly after this, Edward Monkford shows up to Jane’s part-time job. They have coffee, and Edward explains that he’s interested in a “relationship unencumbered by convention” (68). Edward and Jane go to One Folgate Street and sleep together. Afterwards, Jane asks Edward about Emma’s death and the man who has been leaving the flowers. Edward answers her questions with short responses, and then leaves.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
In the opening chapters of The Girl Before, JP Delaney establishes a back-and-forth narrative between Emma’s story from the past and Jane’s story in the present. Unlike some novels, which are told from multiple perspectives to weave one larger story, the two plots in this text serve as mirrors to one another, telling almost the same story concurrently. The intentional repetition of the plot elements is evidence from Delaney’s choice of opening epigraphs, which describe lovers “repeat[ing] themselves” and “serial killers […] engaging in repetitive behavior” (1); these foreshadow the central character relationships in the novel. In the third epigraph, Delaney cites Sigmund Freud, famed psychologist, who articulates that a patient reproduces what “he has forgotten and repressed” as an “action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (1). The reproduction of something that has been “repressed” through actions could be Delaney hinting at the ways Emma and Jane’s individual traumas are repeated and repressed, or this could be a darker foreshadowing of another character being murdered at One Folgate Street.
Both of the protagonists who narrate sections of the novel are women who have experienced a significant trauma and have not yet resolved the impact of that event on their lives. Emma has experienced a violent break-in and sexual assault, while Jane has experienced having to give birth to her dead baby. Both women are portrayed as vulnerable and emotional as a result of these painful experiences. Emma describes that since the break-in she’s “virtually been living in the same two pairs of jeans and an old baggy sweater” (19) and experiences frequent bouts of rage. Jane, on the other hand, is often triggered into thinking about the stillborn child, expressing her feelings of “raging grief” and “numbness” (27). The characterization of both women as wounded helps to explain their choice to live in an unforgiving, restrictive environment like One Folgate Street. In addition, their unstable emotional responses and constant musing over their traumatic experiences give a foreboding mood to the novel’s opening chapters.
While One Folgate Street is portrayed as an austere, pale environment, flowers continue appearing inside it and outside it. First, Jane describes the “blood-red blooms” of tulips when she tours the apartment (12); later, she notes the lack of flowers in the “pristine blankness of the garden” (51). Then Jane begins to receive the lilies on the doorstep of the home, one “huge bouquet” (52) after another. While the lilies, she discovers, are being left as a memorial to Emma, the tulips are replaced each week by the housekeeper. The motif of the flowers sharply juxtaposes the cool tones of One Folgate Street. In fact, the tulips are the only other living thing inside the house besides the tenants. If the lilies represent Emma, who has died, then the tulips, “blood-red,” seem to be in some way tied to Jane’s own presence in the house.
