The Girl Before

JP Delaney switches back and forth between two narrators: Jane and Emma. How does the shifting narrative style impact other craft elements of The Girl Before?

Architecture plays an important role in the character’s lives in the novel. Explore how the physical space of One Folgate Street impacts one character’s life and psychological development over the course of the novel.

Each of the female tenants at One Folgate Street has experienced a traumatic event before moving in. Analyze how trauma changes a person’s behavior, relationships, and decisions, using psychological theory to support your ideas.

Analyze how the structure and content of the chapter headings relates to the plot itself. Either choose a small subset of chapter headings as they relate to key climactic moments, or comment on the development of the headings over time as these relate to the more general plot structure.

Is the title of The Girl Before meant to reference Jane’s stillborn child, Isabel, or to reference Emma and Elizabeth, who are the girls before Jane? Choose one “girl before” and analyze how this is made clear through the novel’s development.

Food plays a prominent role in interpersonal interactions between the characters in the novel. What does food represent in the novel? Does food represent different things for different characters?

The structure of The Girl Before is different than traditional novels, in that each chapter is broken up into smaller sections that go back and forth between the two protagonists. Towards the end of the novel, Emma’s narration stops almost completely. Why did JP Delaney structure the novel in this way, and what impact does it have?

At the beginning of the novel, both Emma and Simon appear to be different than they do later in the novel. Choose one of the two characters and analyze what foreshadowing is present in Delaney’s writing prior to the revelation that they have been operating under false pretenses.