Margot Covey

Margot Covey is the eldest of the Covey sisters and is studying at St. Andrews, away from the Virginia home that remains the center of her family life. Though much of her presence in the novel is seen through Lara Jean’s memories and references, those details make Margot more than an absent older sister: she continues to shape the family’s rituals, Lara Jean’s ideas about relationships, and the ordinary objects that hold the sisters together.

Identity and Life Away

Margot’s move to St. Andrews gives the family a new experience of distance. In a letter to John Ambrose McClaren, Lara Jean notes that Margot is studying in Scotland and jokes that she might meet a prince there, since St. Andrews is where Prince William and Kate Middleton met. The humor sits alongside Lara Jean’s own uncertainty about college: she once imagined attending the University of Virginia and living at home, but is now considering dorm life. Margot’s departure therefore serves as a practical example of a sister already living beyond the family home, while Lara Jean weighs how far she is ready to go.

Distance does not erase Margot from home. At Kitty’s birthday sleepover, Lara Jean lays out nightgowns, pajamas, footed long underwear, and fuzzy slippers, noting that she, Margot, and Kitty have accumulated plenty between them. Margot is not at the party, but the shared collection makes her part of its preparations. Her place in the sisters’ life persists not only in recollection but in things still used and kept at home.

Family Rituals and Continuing Presence

The sisters’ hanboks mark their connection to family history. Margot’s outfit has a yellow jacket and apple-green skirt, while Lara Jean wears a hot-pink skirt with an ivory-white jacket and an embroidered bow. Their grandmother bought the garments on a previous visit to Korea. The clothing is also part of a lively domestic scene: Kitty complains that her sleeves and skirt are too short, while Lara Jean struggles to arrange her own bow. Margot’s appearance in this comparison places her within a shared sisterly ritual, even as each girl’s garment fits differently.

At the New Year gathering, the family follows the Korean custom of bowing to elders in age order, with the elders giving money in return. The ritual brings generations together, and the account also records the empty place beside Daddy on the couch since the sisters’ mother died. Lara Jean feels the loss sharply and vows to herself that Daddy will not be alone there the next year. Margot belongs to this family structure as the eldest daughter, although the scene’s most explicit emotional response is Lara Jean’s. The ceremony makes the family’s continuity visible while also exposing the absence around which its traditions have endured.

Margot’s growing independence appears in another family ritual: Valentine’s Day. Daddy had typically received one card from all three sisters, but this year Margot is sending him one of her own for the first time. The small change distinguishes her from the younger girls and signals a new stage in the family’s habits. Lara Jean also makes a card for Josh, with Kitty taking the lead and Lara Jean adding her name, while she prepares a separate, playful card for Peter. The different cards show how a shared holiday can hold several kinds of affection at once: filial, sisterly, and romantic.

Food and language also connect Margot to the family’s Korean inheritance. During dinner, Daddy worries that his galbi jjim is not tender enough and recalls that the first time he ate the dish was on a date with the sisters’ mother, who ordered in Korean and explained each dish. As Margot cuts her meat, she stops when he remembers that meal. His recollection turns dinner into a moment of family history, and he expresses regret that the girls did not continue Korean school. Lara Jean responds that she would take Korean at the University of Virginia if admitted; Daddy says their mother would have loved that. Later, he imagines a family trip to Korea, which their mother had wanted to take with the girls, and Kitty suggests that Grandma come along as a guide. These exchanges establish the family context in which Margot grew up, without specifying how she herself responds to the prospect of renewed language study or travel.

Relationships and Lara Jean’s Perspective

Margot’s former relationship with Josh remains a significant reference point for Lara Jean. When Lara Jean explains to Peter why she values the possibility of casual dating, she recalls Margot saying she wished she had not let her relationship with Josh become so serious. Lara Jean connects that regret with Peter’s account of how difficult things became with Genevieve, and says she hopes that a breakup need not make former partners unable to be in the same room. Margot’s experience thus informs Lara Jean’s hopes for a less painful kind of romance, even though the novel presents that lesson through Lara Jean’s retelling rather than through Margot’s own account.

The force of that past is clearest when Lara Jean discovers that Josh is seeing Liza Booker. She watches Josh walk Liza to her car and kiss her, a gesture that recalls how he once kissed Margot. Lara Jean is startled by the sight of him with someone other than her sister and judges Liza against Margot, whom she places beyond comparison. This reaction reveals as much about Lara Jean’s attachment to her sister and the old relationship as it does about Margot: Margot remains the standard by which Lara Jean understands the significance of Josh’s new romance.

Margot is also woven into Lara Jean’s memories of adolescence. Lara Jean recalls that Genevieve used to sleep over most nights during one summer, when the girls discussed every detail of what had happened with the boys. In one such conversation, Genevieve imagined a future group of couples that included Peter, Lara Jean, John, and their friends. Margot is not part of that particular imagined circle, but elsewhere her relationship with Josh supplies Lara Jean with a model—and a caution—when she thinks about how teenage romance can become too serious. The contrast underscores how Lara Jean’s understanding of love is assembled from the different histories of people close to her.

Change and Narrative Role

As an older sister living away, Margot occupies a position between the household’s past and its present. She is associated with established family rituals, including the hanboks bought by Grandma, but she is also beginning independent traditions, such as sending Daddy her own Valentine. Her absence is tangible in the family’s routines: at a birthday dinner, Kitty asks what their mother liked with roast chicken, and Lara Jean cannot remember. That question points to the work of keeping family memory alive, a responsibility shared among the sisters even when Margot is not present at the table.

The novel’s glimpses of Margot are deliberately mediated by Lara Jean’s attention. A dress, a card, a collection of slippers, a remembered regret about Josh, and a video call all give her shape without making her the narrator of her own story. When Daddy photographs Lara Jean before a dance and sends the pictures to Margot, Margot immediately video-calls to see the outfit for herself. She asks for a picture of Lara Jean with Stormy and wants to know what John is wearing. The exchange is brief, but it shows Margot keeping up with family news from afar and taking an active interest in her sister’s evening. Across these moments, distance changes the form of her participation, not her importance: she remains a source of counsel, a familiar presence in the household, and one of the relationships through which Lara Jean measures growing up.