52 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel HawkinsThe Villa
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Emily finds Chess in the kitchen listening to a playlist she had made for a 20th anniversary party of their friendship. Emily reminds Chess there was no party, and they discuss what was going on in their lives at that time and how it interfered with their friendship. Emily had written two of her mysteries around that time. Her husband Matt had been strongly expressing his desire to have children. Chess’s two books—Things My Mama Never Taught Me and The Powered Path—had made her famous, and she appeared on Oprah’s talk show. Emily remembers that Matt had not warmed up to Chess right away, appearing annoyed with her at their wedding reception.
While they reminisce, Chess heats up food cooked by Giulia, a local resident of Orvieto who comes in to help at the Villa. Giulia is a relative of the helper who worked at the house during the summer of 1974 when Pierce was killed. After they eat, Chess and Emily move to a smaller parlor, where the gothic-like atmosphere of the house becomes apparent. They look at a copy of Aestas, the album Lara wrote at the villa, and the source of the villa’s new name (since that summer). They talk about how popular the album was, and how Emily’s mother undoubtedly owned a copy—these references to their mothers brings up their closeness as children, and how much time Chess spent at Emily’s house. Chess has been a frustrating friend to Emily; Emily mentally adds the anniversary party that never happened to the book they had planned to co-author in college: a list of failed or incomplete projects and plans. Chess asks Emily to think about writing something together again and they discuss the unwritten book from college.
Chapter 5 Summary
Emily wakes up with a hangover, and takes a hot shower. Finding the house empty, Emily reads a note from Chess that Giulia has left sandwiches for them. Emily sips her coffee in a sitting room at the back of the house and hears her phone beep. She sees a message from Matt asking if she’s arrived. His reaching out strikes her as abnormal—amid their divorce, Matt and Emily communicate through lawyers. She checks her Instagram and sees a new comment on her Italy post from Matt, who seems to sarcastically wish her a good time with Chess. As she reads another text message where he expresses concern for her and her writing deadlines, Emily begins to type out a harsh message, criticizing him for leaving her when she was ill. Deciding to delete her reply and not send it, she also deletes his message. Going into a bedroom with bookshelves, she looks through the books she finds there, discovering a copy of Mari’s Lilith Rising. Observing the cover and its bloody imagery, Emily scans for any biographical information. She searches on her phone and finds a picture of Mari at an Italian courthouse, with a hand stretching out to block the camera, mirroring the outstretched hand covered in blood that graces the cover of Lilith Rising. As she stands in the bedroom, book in hand, she looks back to see Chess standing there. As Chess notices the horror-filled cover of Lilith Rising, Chess tells Emily she’ll try to do a similar cover for her next self-help book. Neither has read the book, but Emily reminds them they watched a film of it at a sleepover as children. Chess has no memory of being there, saying she wasn’t invited. The movie scared Emily and she remains unconvinced that Chess wasn’t there. Chess teases Emily about the book, and Emily offers that, just as they listened to Aestas the night before, they could read the other work written at the villa. Chess notes the difference between the album and the book, emphasizing the latter’s dark material and ignoring that Aestas chronicles the breakup of their friend group in 1974 and, obliquely, Pierce’s murder. Emily relents, telling Chess that she will read something lighter. Thinking that Chess has already forgotten about writing a book together, Emily tells herself that she will not be disappointed if she doesn’t discuss it further.
Chapter 6 Summary
As the chapter opens, Emily and Chess work together, and Chess asks about Emily’s character Petal. Emily contrasts her own lack of progress during their time together to Chess, who types away at her computer. Thinking about how she owes money to the bookkeeper hired by her lawyer, Emily knows that she must finish the book. While she’s largely remained silent on Matt’s demands, Emily wonders if she should tell Chess. Deciding that she already feels too much like a failure, Emily doesn’t. Chess asks Emily if she still wants to write the books—and together they discuss Emily’s growing apathy toward the novels and her character Dex’s resemblance to Matt. Emily and Chess discuss Matt and his unsuitability for Emily, and Emily expresses her desire to see Matt in pain. Expecting Chess to support her bitter feelings, Chess instead echoes her self-help books—proving to Emily that her identity as a self-help guru runs deeper than Emily originally thought.
Emily expresses her surprise that Chess’s transformation is authentic, and the tension builds between them, while Chess continues to work. Leaving their shared space, Emily begins to read Lilith Rising on a window seat upstairs. Reading through Mari’s opening lines and description of the English countryside and the rambling house that serves as the setting, Emily sees the initial M carved into the window.
The narrative switches to Mari, who describes Orvieto in 1974. Pierce plays music for her, which she enjoys, telling him that it’s brilliant. She and Pierce grow closer, and he alludes to her absence from him, after the death of their infant son Billy. Noel interrupts them and tells Pierce he’s ready to make music. Mari leaves the house, going to the dock to see Lara at the end of the pier. As she goes toward Lara, Mari sees Johnnie, who tells her that her hair is pretty. They discuss his relationship with Noel, as Johnnie admits that Noel thinks he spies on Noel for Noel’s manager or wife Arabella. As they talk, it becomes clear that Johnnie has feelings for Mari, and that night he carves her initial into a window (near the window seat where Emily starts reading Lilith Rising in the current timeline). Seeing the initial, Mari begins to write Lilith Rising.
Following Mari’s narrative in the flashback, The Villa quotes a podcast episode focused on Pierce’s murder, in which two female hosts play snippets from Aestas, before discussing Pierce’s less savory characteristics, including his desire for younger women. Mari is 16 when they begin seeing each other.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Chapters 4-6 continue to unearth the past—both that of Mari and her friends at the Villa and in London before and Emily and Chess, from childhood to the present. Like the chapters before, these depend on Emily’s first-person narration, and, in flashbacks to 1974, Mari’s first-person narrative. Including both, and moving between in a non-linear fashion, these chapters forge a connection between Mari and Emily, stressing how the theme of History, Haunting, and Houses continues to structure the novel. The Costs of Fame surfaces again as a theme, as Emily battles Matt and the tension about publishing and work simmers between Chess and Emily. After Emily finds a copy of Lilith Rising, Mari’s novel, their connection deepens, and Emily begins to see how Femininity, Monstrosity, and Truth links the novel to the events of the villa.
The Gothic setting that Mari describes in her novel, Lilith Rising, and the rambling Somerton House at first appears distinct from the clean and elegant lines of Villa Aestas—smaller than Emily imagined, but grand in its proportions and appointments. Mari’s description doesn’t depict the villa, despite Emily’s novel-length quest to connect the novel and Pierce’s murder in 1974. While Villa Aestas and Somerton House are both old, the meticulous layout of the Italian house stands in stark opposition to the Mari’s fictional manor, and the oldest parts of the original house—a kitchen no one used, one of the outbuildings—dated from the 1300s. The rest of the house had grown up around those parts like a snail’s shell, curling around itself. (71). Mari uses terms that suggest a living house, growing like a snail’s shell, with separate unseen spaces, different from the villa. Emily recognizes this, declaring, “This is Italy, though, not the English countryside, and the description isn’t super specific” (90). Somerton House and Villa Aestas share Mari though—she creates one and lives at the other, where in the present Emily imagines “Mari Godwick sitting in this same spot almost fifty years ago, a notebook on her raised knees, scribbling down the story that will one day become one of the most famous horror novels in the world” (90). Chess makes the connection between the two more visible, as she stages a room in the villa to highlight the Gothic atmosphere of the villa. As Chess offers Emily “an appropriately Gothic hangout” (54), she brings Emily into a sitting room, lit by flickering candlelight, the space is transformed. It feels intimate, but also glamorous, and more than a little mysterious […] It feels like this room has seen some things” (54). Personifying this now-Gothic room, Emily demonstrates how the interplay among History, Haunting, and Houses connects the two spaces and Mari and Emily.
The original cast of figures at Villa Aestas arrive with different levels of fame and ambition: Noel Gordon, world-famous for his band The Rovers, sits at the apex of his career. His guests, from Lara and Mari to Pierce, each becomes more famous after that summer, even in death for Pierce. These chapters trace the costs for this fame, either as it waxes or wanes, and the deals they all make to get it, foreshadowing the awful choices Emily and Chess make to maintain their friendship and careers. Emily discovers Lilith Rising in the house, telling Chess about it—Chess does the same for Emily, when she sees a vinyl of Aestas, Lara’s album inspired by the summer. Originally named Villa Rosato, Villa Aestas takes a different name because of Lara’s album, which “sold like twenty million copies” she adds, gesturing back toward the record player, “but I’d make an actual deal with Satan to sell twenty million copies of anything” (55). Chess jokes about selling her soul, but privately Emily believes Chess has done this to sell self-help books. As Emily and Chess find inspiration at the villa, they come close to striking their own metaphorical bargains with their inner demons.
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