‘The Women We Become After Children’: Palimpsests of the City and the Self in Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine

Maggie O’Farrell's characters are often found struggling to dig back through layers of time and memory to gain access to buried truths or previous versions of themselves. In The Hand that First Held Mine this layering is evident in both protagonists, Lexie and Elina, whose identities undergo multiple incarnations over the novel's course. Set half a century apart, these women’s intertwining stories also allow O’Farrell to map one version of London on top of the other thus drawing parallels between the stratified city and the stratified self.
By employing the concept of the ‘palimpsest’, this chapter will unpack these parallels and reveal how O’Farrell’s approach resembles that of Virginia Woolf. It will also use Sarah Dillon’s recent distinction between ‘traditional palimpsest reading’ and an engagement with ‘palimpsestuousness’ to show how The Hand that First Held Mine adopts a more complex – and indeed, more formally ambitious – strategy than O’Farrell’s previous novels to interrogate questions of motherhood and female identity.