52 pages • 1 hour read
The Villa
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Preface-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death by suicide and includes references to miscarriage and abortion.
The untitled preface is formed of two passages written by Hawkins and purporting to be excerpts from other works. The first an excerpt from Lilith Rising, the fictional novel Mari Godwick writes at Villa Rosato (later Villa Aestas) in 1976, part of The Villa’s narrative. In the excerpt, Victoria, the main character of Mari’s novel, describes the memories of houses and how they preserve traces of the past, as she remembers a house and a summer that, she hints, will have a dark history. The second of the two excerpts offers a feminist reading of the novel by Dr. Elisabeth Radnor, a fictional professor whose book The Lady and the Monster: Women in Horror, 1932-1990 traces female agency and the character Victoria in the narrative of horror in Lilith Rising.
Chapter 1 Summary
Emily, the protagonist and main narrator of The Villa, meets her childhood friend Jessica Chandler, now known as Chess Chandler, for lunch. Chess, a famous author and self-help guru, breezes in, dressed casually and impeccably, late for their lunch. Although they share a close history, the two women are also distant, and Emily catalogues how their paths have diverged. Both are authors but, while Emily struggles to finish the latest installment in her “Petal Bloom” mystery series and to manage her difficult divorce proceedings, Chess appears on Oprah and monetizes her slogans and books, making a fortune from self-help and influencing. They discuss their history, from childhood to college, and acknowledge the more recent distance in their friendship.
Chapter 2 Summary
After their lunch, Emily confesses she doesn’t think she’ll hear again from Chess. She reveals more of their more recent history. After college, they followed different paths: Chess took waitressing jobs, moved to Charleston, and met new people. Emily remained closer to home, marrying an accountant named Matt Sheridan. Matt is the muse for Dex Shanahan, the almost-love interest of Petal Bloom, the main character of Emily’s mystery series. Suffering from writer’s block, Emily considers that the Matt/Dex connection might explain her inability to finish. She finds herself only able to write some gruesome scenes, which she deletes, knowing that they will be cut by her editor.
As Emily considers Matt and Dex, she recounts how their divorce has become acrimonious—Matt and his lawyer have claimed part of Emily’s royalties for the Petal Bloom series, based on suggestions he made while she was writing the series and her off-the-cuff remark in an interview about his importance to the books. Coming out of her reverie, Emily notices two missed texts from Chess. Chess writes in all caps that she has a plan. Emily is skeptical: She has heard grand plans before from Chess which are rarely following through (in particular the plan to co-author a book in college). She returns in her mind to Matt and his financial demands. Trying to make sense of them, she considers how they’re not wealthy, and the books were never a runaway success, but that he had supported them and paid for treatment for the inexplicable sickness which she began to experience toward the end of their marriage. Matt had also been putting some pressure on Emily to have a baby, which also led to the breakdown of their relationship.
She has a glass of wine and calls Chess. Chess notes the inappropriateness of calling after receiving a text. Chess has rented the Villa Aestas outside Orvieto, Italy, and plans to work on her next self-help book there. She invites Emily to join her to work there too. Emily is hesitant but Chess convinces her. Chess offers to pay for her flight, but Emily insists on covering her own ticket.
An email exchange between Emily and Chess follows. Emily tells Chess that a famous murder occurred in Villa Aestas in the in the 1970s and a popular podcast focuses on the house and the crime. Chess’s reply seems to dismiss this news, brushing aside Emily’s mention of the murder. Emily promises to mention the murder house only five times once they arrive.
Next appear song lyrics. The details are given that these are from Lara Larchmont’s Aestas, composed at the villa in 1974, and they give the villa its current name. Previously, the villa was named Villa Rosato.
The narrative shifts to a new character, Mari Godwick, in London, 1974. Mari is Lara’s stepsister. Mari recounts her quite privileged upbringing, the father of a leading intellectual and a famous journalist. After Mari’s mother died, her father remarried, to Lara’s mother, Jane Larchmont. Mari details how she met her current lover Pierce Sheldon, a man who left his wife and child for Mari. An aspiring and talented musician, he’s older than Mari. Mari has been disowned by her father due to the affair and she and Pierce live cheaply in a small flat, with Lara as their flatmate. Mari is attempting to write a novel but Pierce’s inability to share domestic chores and concerns means that Mari’s aspirations take the backseat to Pierce’s dreams. She compares her flat with the house she shared with her father before he married Jane, and Jane and Lara moved in with them. After that, their house was as cramped as the space she now shares with Pierce and Lara.
She remembers meeting Pierce at her father’s house, how she fell in love and their life together since. She and Pierce aren’t monogamous but Mari had a child named Billy with him. Billy died from fever as an infant. In the aftermath, Pierce and Lara had sex. They have both promised Mari it wouldn’t happen again.
As Mari thinks about Pierce and their cramped house, Lara invites Mari and Pierce to Italy to stay at Villa Rosato in Orvieto, guests of Noel Gordon. Noel is the lead in the famous band The Rovers and is involved with Lara. Mari is hesitant, remembering a previous holiday in France and Italy, and how miserable they had been. She thinks about how Lara had moved in with Pierce and Mari after the trip, even though she could have gone back to her mother and Mari’s father’s house. As she considers this painful history, she grows accustomed to the idea of spending time in Italy and the writing she could do. She agrees to go.
Next follows a short excerpt from a future fictional critical biography about Mari, written after her death. It describes Mari’s parents, her birth and the fact that Mari’s mother died of complications after giving birth to her. It also includes details of her mother’s many alleged sexual partners. The excerpt details Mari’s guilt about her mother’s death and its haunting of her life. It reveals that, at the time of the biography, Mari is the author of works including Lilith Rising, the only novel published during her lifetime. The others, found hidden in her flat, were published posthumously.
The chapter ends with a notice from Pop Beats Magazine offering news about the break The Rovers have taken while Noel Gordon, the earl of Rochdale’s son, taking his wife on a honeymoon.
Chapter 3 Summary
Emily arrives in Rome at Fiumicino Airport, taking the train north to Orvieto, a small medieval town situated between Florence and Rome. As Emily sees Italy, tears appear in her eyes when she grasps that she has managed the trip without Matt. Meeting Chess and arriving at the villa, Emily notes that the villa is smaller than she imagined, but it has a grand staircase and a manicured formal garden and a pool. Emily moves into a small room picked out for her by Chess, who notes how suitable the room seemed for her. Chess’s room is grander. Relieved to be in Italy and away from her domestic stresses, Emily makes a comment about Pierce’s murder in 1974, and Chess warns her playfully that she has only has four more times to mention the murder. Chess encourages Emily about her work, promising that Emily will write well in this new environment.
Preface-Chapter 3 Analysis
The opening chapters introduce and contextualize the characters of Emily and Chess and their friendship. Having grown up together in North Carolina, and then grown apart from each other as Chess found fame, their relationship demonstrates the complex and sometimes uneasy dynamics of female friendship. This friendship becomes central to Hawkins’s transforming of Gothic conventions and suspense in the novel and these chapters, as it echoes the dynamic between Mari Godwick and Lara Larchmont, two women who also stay at Villa Aestas a half century before. Chapters 1-3 highlight how Hawkins reimagines these Gothic conventions, exploring History, Haunting, and Houses through Villa Aestas and the Somerton House in Mari’s novel Lilith Rising. These updated Gothic settings, with their echoes of Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, serve as a place to trace The Costs of Fame, which Emily begins to understand, as she traces the earlier events at the villa in 1974. Mari’s experience at the villa and her history with her mother show how Femininity, Monstrosity, and Truth structures not only the relationship between these female creators in 1974 and 2022, but also the creative output they produce, which ultimately gives them fame.
In locating the Gothic in the Romantic environs of Umbria and Orvieto, Hawkins follows an established literary convention and shows how even paradisiacal spaces can haunt and be haunted. As Mari’s novel Lilith Rising and its first excerpt before Chapter 1 makes clear, “Houses remember” (1). This phrase appears seven times in the novel, connecting the spaces where memories happen to the memories themselves and their preservation. Personifying these inanimate spaces, this line and its repetition cast houses as presences that can motivate and affect those who live within. This line, around which Mari structures her novel, reaches beyond the confines of her fiction, influencing how she and others exist in the spaces of the novel. Asking herself at the beginning of the novel if “houses had memories” (29), she considers her own life, thinking about her father’s house and its memories of her mother’s death and, simultaneously, her birth. Wondering if “the little house near St. Pancras hold[s] on to Mari’s past” (29), Mari considers how memories become sticky, staying in the places where they happen, locked in a house’s spatial memory, with specters that haunt these spaces. Gothic conventions suggest something similar, as their dark and foreboding settings hold on to pain and ghosts, helping to preserve and deploy them later. Twisting this convention, Hawkins foreshadows that Villa Aestas offers a contrast between light and dark, as it serves as a stage for the horror of domestic friction and the pain of artistic creation. A “place [that] exudes a warmth, a serenity that feels totally at odds with someone getting their brains bashed in” (46), Villa Aestas can hold on to horror, representing the complexity of the people who stay at the villa, capable of both good and evil.
This dichotomy between good and evil connects with the novel’s tracing of The Costs of Fame, especially its pernicious effect on personal relationships. Although they both write professionally and publish, Chess and Emily have found different paths, and Emily’s earlier promise as a writer in college has been frustrated by marriage and its dissolution. Her resentment to these changed circumstances becomes visible in these early chapters, as Emily confesses inwardly that she reads her best friend Chess’s books “because I was looking for shit to dislike, looking for sentences to roll my eyes at” (9). The twists in the friendship, characterized by a competition that echoes the one between Lara and Mari 50 years earlier, partly originate from a desire to create and be known. This desire becomes harder for women, as the novel demonstrates the domestic duties foisted onto women by men hinder their own creative output. Pierce Sheldon, Mari’s lover, imagines them as two creative souls producing, but this fiction shatters again and again when Mari realizes that, “It was hard for two people to be artists when the rugs needed hoovering, and food needed to be purchased, dishes washed. And somehow, those things kept falling on her” (27). Like Mari before her, Emily chafes under this domestic yoke—as her husband Matt’s overweening desire to have children conflicts with her own desire to write. Her Petal Bloom series, a group of tame mysteries centered on Petal Bloom and her private investigator Dex, owes its demise to Matt, who serves as the model for Dex. His controlling behavior and pressure to have children block his wife, a writer, from finishing her contracted 10th installment.
As their marriage collapses, and Matt has an affair, abandoning Emily, who has lived with symptoms of a mystery illness, Matt’s actions demonstrate how Femininity, Monstrosity, and Truth connect. Emily must become the monster for Matt to make sense of his despicable conduct. Emily becomes the villain, as the novel suggests women have traditionally been cast, in life and in Gothic fiction, as female identity becomes linked to the monstrous. This is a function of the male gaze which “others” women in order to rationalize and expunge fear, guilt, and other negative feelings. The Villa has solely female narratives and voices, reclaiming this space but also showing how women have internalized this cultural misogyny, in the ways Mari, Emily, Chess, and Lara navigate the futures laid out before them. Pain and playing the monster become an inherited legacy, which Mari gestures to in thinking about her young son’s death, “Wondering if her baby dying was the universe’s way of settling the score, since Mari’s birth had killed her mother” (38). Haunted by her painful entrance into the world, she wonders if she’s doomed to play the villain and be a victim.
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