45 pages • 1 hour read
The Hand That First Held Mine
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Part 1, Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section references traumatic childbirth, miscarriage, the traumatic loss of a parent, and attempted sexual assault.
The narrator describes the natural world as waiting in anticipation. The scene is a family home between Devon and Cornwall around 1955; a baby is sleeping in a stroller in the garden. Lexie (referred to at this point as “Alexandra”) explodes from the house, 21 years old and enraged at parental injustice.
The point of view shifts to show Innes Kent, an art dealer and critic, witnessing the same moment. Innes’s car has broken down, and he is frustrated both by this and by the artist he visited earlier. Kent encounters Lexie and watches her through a hedge. He thinks of her as a piece of art. Lexie angrily confronts him about watching her. He explains the situation with his car and argues that he wasn’t spying on her. He assumes the baby is her own, but she corrects him, angry that he thinks the baby—her sibling—belongs to her. They talk more and she discovers he’s from London, where she says she plans to move. He questions why she hasn’t, and she decides that her family’s disapproval is not enough to keep her in the country. She explains to Innes that she left college because she went through a “Men’s Only” door and refuses, to the embarrassment of her family, to apologize for it.
As they talk, Lexie’s mother approaches, bothered by the potential inappropriateness of a strange man talking to her daughter. Her mother calls her “Sandra,” which Lexie rejects, and helps Innes on his way. After he leaves, Lexie and her mother fight about whether it was appropriate for Lexie to talk to Innes.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
The point of view switches to Elina waking up in darkness. She believes her pregnancy woke her, but when she feels her stomach there is no baby in it. She screams and wakes Ted, her boyfriend, and says the baby’s gone. He jumps up and shows her the baby has been born and is in the bassinet next to her. She doesn’t remember the birth. She gets up and holds the baby, fascinated by him. She assures Ted that she does remember the birth, though she still doesn’t.
The next morning Ted goes to work, leaving Elina home with the baby. She still can’t remember the birth, though she remembers being pregnant. She loses time as she goes through her day but manages to care for her son, with whom she is bonding. She spends some time looking at the garden shed where she paints and vividly remembers Ted having the shed built for her.
Ted, at work, involuntarily recalls the traumatic birth of four days prior; he has to physically move himself to break free of the memory of Elina nearly dying of blood loss.
Back at home, Elina is still experiencing jumps in time, losing track of where she was and what she was doing. She gets a visit from a home health worker or social worker who asks her questions that she struggles to answer. Finally, she manages to ask the woman to reschedule.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
After Innes leaves, Lexie storms away from her mother and locks herself in her room for the rest of the day. She looks out her window and sees Innes drive up, leaving a note in the hedge where they met. She rushes down and reads it. The note invites her to lunch and suggests she shorten her name not to Sandra as her mother calls her, but to Lexie: “It seems to me that you require a name with rather more brio” (34). From this moment on, she is Lexie.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Elina and Ted sit together on the couch. She asks him if he remembers a trip they took together. He recalls it just as she drifts into sleep. He muses on his problems with memory and contrasts his childhood with Elina’s; she has many stories of siblings and family vacations, but his childhood is largely muddy. He only really recalls times when his parents were absent or uninvolved. He decides he has an opportunity to be for his son what he wanted and didn’t have as a child.
Elina wakes from a dream, hitting Ted accidentally. Noticing a palette knife nearby, she picks it up but grows disturbed when she notices Ted watching her closely. She suddenly feels a need to see the baby and is extremely relieved to find that he’s fine. The next morning, she is still having trouble recalling the baby’s birth and considers calling Ted. She recalls being pregnant and feels far away from the woman she was then. She reminds herself of her name to remind herself of her own identity. Still losing time, she decides to get dressed and finds a red scarf in a pile of clothes. The red scarf brings back her first memory of the trauma of giving birth—the blood on the white hospital floor during her surgery.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Lexie and Innes have begun a romantic relationship. She is standing in his apartment, looking out of a window as she often does. The narrator observes that Lexie’s life will be short and then “rewinds” the “film” of Lexie’s life, showing her relationship with Innes and arrival in London in reverse.
Before she moved to London, Lexie’s family gave her various pieces of advice, mostly about how to interact with men, which she ignores: “[N]eedless to say, she disregarded them all [her relatives]” (52). When she moves to London she finds a room at a boarding house for young unmarried women, run by a woman named Mrs. Collins. Lexie meets a friend, Hannah, who helps her arrange and decorate her new apartment.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Elina figures out a system to calm her son and get through the rhythm of their day. She goes up to the attic to probe her memory more deeply by inspecting the C-section scar. As she stands there, the entire experience of the surgery comes back, and she recalls her fears and her trauma. She is interrupted by the baby crying downstairs, but instead of going to the baby, she goes out the front door. As she steps out, “she feels curiously like two people” (61), as though she has split into a spirit and a body. She walks to the end of the street but is pulled back to the house, coming back together as one unified person and comforting the baby: “‘It’s all right,’ Elina tells him. And she believes it herself, this time” (62).
Part 1, Chapters 1-6 Analysis
The beginning of the novel introduces the narrative style, the major themes, the major characters, and the major conflicts, with the stylistic choices O’Farrell makes reinforcing the themes and characterization. The first few sentences offer a bird’s-eye view of Lexie’s home, demonstrating both the novel’s setting and a sense of visual art that (hinting at one of the major themes). The narration then zooms in on Lexie, and from that point on most of the narration is in third person close rather than third person omniscient. However, the point-of-view character varies throughout the novel, which the first chapter establishes by shifting from Lexie in her parents’ garden to Innes at the side of the road. The second chapter mirrors the first in that it begins in Elina’s point of view and then shifts to Ted’s when he goes to work. This narrative resemblance between the two storylines suggests that there is a connection between Lexie and Innes in the 1950s and Elina and Ted more than half a century later.
Beginning the story with Lexie also establishes her as a primary focal character and the novel’s protagonist. It is her identity and refusal to acquiesce to societal norms that drive the discoveries and experiences of all the other major characters. Lexie as the originator of the narrative is in a sense the mother of the story, highlighting the power of an individual mother over an entire generation. Her refusal to be called “Sandra” also introduces a recurring connection between names and identity. Lexie is not the Sandra her mother saw, nor even the Alexandra of her youth; rather, she is Innes’s lover, a journalist, and an independent woman at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing their independence. The name change, like Lexie’s choice to go to London and refusal to apologize for using a men’s door, establishes her as a woman with a strong sense of self. Elina’s use of her own name to try to steady herself in the aftermath of birth trauma further suggests that names are powerful and tied to an internal identity: “Elina Vilkuna, she says to herself, is your name. That is who you are. She feels she must confine herself to known things, to facts. Then perhaps everything else will fall into place” (45).
Notably, Ted’s last name is (for readers) at this point a mystery, much like his childhood. Given Elina’s assertion that certainty in one’s own identity is key to understanding anything else, this lack of clarity foreshadows problems ahead. Both his and Elina’s struggles stem from trauma, establishing The Effect of Trauma on Memory as a core theme. However, Ted’s experience of trauma is multilayered; the experience of Elina nearly dying calls up buried memories connected to his loss of his mother, though he won’t realize this until the end of the novel. In their first few weeks of parenthood, Ted and Elina’s struggles to remember and understand their past underpin their struggles to establish a clear identity in the wake of trauma.
Even as she grasps for that identity, however, Elina’s life revolves around her new child. Her innate connection to the baby is central to the novel’s exploration of The Universality of Motherhood and both complicates and facilitates her journey back to herself. Her fear whenever the baby is not close—a fear she finds unfamiliar and inexplicable—suggests that motherhood makes one vulnerable by linking one’s identity to something outside oneself. However, the very instinctiveness of this link makes it a foundation on which one can build.
Innes’s point of view introduces another theme, The Transformative Power of Art, when he first sees Lexie and imagines her as artwork:
And what he sees when he looks at Alexandra in her yellow scarf and blue dress is a scene from a fresco […] he watches, fascinated, as the woman stands up from her tree stump. The della Francesca madonna morphs before his eyes into a version of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (7).
What could be simply a chance meeting is made profound by Innes’s aesthetic view of the world. That passion for art also informs the characterization of Elina, Ted, and Lexie, but the novel’s exploration of the value and importance of art begins in and with Innes, much as its exploration of identity begins with Lexie.
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By Maggie O'Farrell
