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 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Emily keeps Mari’s diary under mattress. Having read most of it, she saves the last chapter, wanting to enjoy the final pages. She imagines that this diary holds the key to connecting Lilith Rising to the events at Villa Aestas in 1974, and she chooses to hide this from Chess. Chess continues to ask, and Emily lies, telling her that she’s working on the Petal Bloom books again.
Emily checks her phone, and notices that she has missed phone calls and messages from Matt, who tells her that he needs to speak with her. Chess notices her frown, and Emily tells her about Matt’s new contact. Chess argues that she must call him back. On the phone, Matt tells her that he needs her to sign paperwork, and Emily admits she hasn’t checked her email. Matt turns hostile, telling her that she can’t avoid paying him by working on a different book. They argue, and each has wounds to share—from Emily telling him that he abandoned her because she became sick to Matt arguing that she lied about wanting children.
Chess and Emily talk after the phone call, with Chess probing about Emily’s desire to have children. Emily asks Chess if she talked to Matt, thinking Chess has told him about the new project. Chess denies everything. As they talk about Matt, Emily’s mysterious illness seems to return, as familiar symptoms begin to appear. Emily runs to the bathroom. Chess attempts to comfort her, giving her other explanations for the sudden symptoms.
In a flashback that follows, Mari tells Noel that Lara is pregnant with his child, and he reacts badly telling her that Lara and he have no future, and he has no plans to live together with her. He tells Mari she can have money, but he contends she wants marriage, and he can’t give her that.
Mari walks away, looking for Lara and finds Pierce at the pond. She tells him about Lara’s pregnancy, and he reacts nonchalantly, telling her that the baby will join their family. A car pulls up, and Noel approaches them with the news that Frances, Pierce’s wife, has died by suicide, drowning in the lake behind Pierce’s ancestral home. Pierce doesn’t feel sadness but instead tells Mari that now they can get married. Noel tells Mari to cut herself loose or she will end up just like Frances.
Chapter 11 Summary
Emily has almost finished her book. She waits to finish her manuscript, having reread Lilith Rising, as she plumbs the depths of the book for clues about where Mari hid the final pages of her diary. Chess plans to cook a big dinner for them, insisting on buying her own ingredients, preparing the dinner, and she sends Emily a picture of a fish on ice, which she and Chess joke about. Noting that she hasn’t asked her literary agent if she told Matt about the new book, she also acknowledges she doesn’t want to know the truth.
While Chess shops, Emily searches for Mari’s pages, finding Chess’s computer, and seeing the file with the new book. She reads and sees that Chess has created a character whose life has imploded named Emma, modeled after Emily. Emma and her life act as a cautionary tale and offer Chess and her readers a way to find the right path. Emily continues to read, discovering that Chess has written about Villa Rosato, concentrating not just on Mari, but on Lara and Pierce, too. Including lyrics from Aestas, Chess crafts a good, but related story to the one Emily has written. Torn between liking the book’s beginning and being angry that Chess has stolen her idea, Emily acknowledges that Chess looked at Lara’s lyrics in a way Emily did not. She now knows where to find the final pages.
Back in 1974, Mari continues to work on her novel, settling on Lilith Rising for a title, as a recognition of her mother’s legacy. Going to get a sandwich, Mari runs into Johnnie, who kisses her without notice, before she rejects him kindly. He then launches a verbal attack at Pierce and Noel, telling Mari what poor choices she’s made and how Pierce will drive her to her death. Johnnie remembers Frances, talking about one of their mutual friends, telling Mari how kind Frances was. Pierce hears Johnnie talk about Frances, and they fight, before Noel breaks up the fight. Pierce lashes out, declaring he hates the villa, and Noel answers him, telling Pierce to leave. Pierce rushes to his room and begins to pack, as Mari stops him, telling Pierce she won’t leave. He decides to stay, too.
After this flashback, Hawkins includes an excerpt from a fictional work of nonfiction, focused on the murder at the villa, detailing the trial of Johnnie and Elena’s essential testimony, before disclosing her brief rise to fame and marriage to the son of a wealthy Italian record executive.
The chapter ends by returning to Orvieto in 1974, offering an alternative to Elena’s testimony and Johnnie’s conviction. Lara and Pierce quarrel, and Lara tells Pierce that he can’t replace Billy with her child. Pierce laments that his in-laws are taking his child with Frances, and Mari hears that Lara and Pierce have slept together recently, throwing into doubt Noel’s paternity. Mari confronts Lara, and Pierce steps on Lara’s guitar, breaking it, before laughing. Lara weeps, and Mari kills Pierce with a statue, beating him again and again. After dealing with the body and framing Johnnie, Mari finishes Lilith Rising as her protagonist Victoria commits murder.
By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that these events reflect only Lilith Rising’s plot, and that in real life it is Johnnie who kills Pierce, not Mari.
Chapter 12 Summary
Emily remains in her room the next day, and she listens to Aestas as she thinks about the version of events she has read. Noting the difficulty of finding clues in Aestas versus Lilith Rising, Emily listens on repeat, mining the music for clues. When she finds something in the lyrics from one of the songs, Emily wants to tell Chess, but her anger and paranoia make that difficult, just as it did for Mari and Lara. She goes to confront Chess, resolute in her desire to tell Chess that she read part of her book. Coming downstairs, she hears Chess on the phone. Unaware of Emily, Chess flirts on the phone, talking softly, and the conversation reminds Emily of how she spoke to Matt. Emily goes to the pool, and when Chess finds her out there, Chess lies and says she was talking to her mother.
Later that night they sit together, and Emily tells Chess that she read her book, after hearing from her literary agent that Matt didn’t hear about the project from her. Emily confronts her about Emma, which Chess claims she was going to erase, but she still finds true sometimes. As the light reflects on Chess’s anklet, Emily sees that it’s Matt’s jewelry and she pounces on Chess.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Chapters 10-12 focus on the shifting relationships past and present, as each group of visitors to the villa begins to take honest appraisal of whom they love and why. As discussions of the villa itself recede—only to return in the final chapters—Hawkins emphasizes The Costs of Fame and explores Femininity, Monstrosity, and Truth, as Chess’s real motives come into focus and Emily views her friend for the complex person she has become. Chess, like the rest of them, can be a monster and do monstrous things to Emily, and still love her. This female friendship, a kind of sisterhood, echoes the troubled, yet close relationship between Mari and Lara. These difficult relationships remain a safeguard against the truly dangerous pain the men in their lives offer. As Chess confesses her affair and Mari finds out Lara broke her promise not to sleep with Pierce, Emily and Mari both entertain violence, and the legacy of Lilith that Mari’s protagonist Victoria represents becomes something for Emily to inherit.
Throughout the novel, Hawkins ties artistic creation to a flouting of norms and a bohemian lifestyle. Pierce can turn away from his marriage, and Noel can take Lara as a lover, but their embrace of these freedoms exists only for them—and their aristocratic backgrounds become a place to retreat when their performative attitudes toward money and family risk real work. After finding out about Lara’s pregnancy, Mari sees the flash of the earl’s son, and “Mari truly understands that he’s the son of an earl. Noel may play at being a bohemian, but his blood is deeply blue, and she suddenly feels very sorry for Lara” (196). Noel has hinted at this transformation, this retreat into his class before in the well in Orvieto, he dismisses Johnnie in class-inflected terms, finding Mari interesting because of her artistic lineage. For the rockstar aristocrat, fame and nobility become intertwined. Lara can only hope to exist on the margins of his magnificence, as he deigns to look down to her and bring her into his orbit.
Just as Lara become pregnant, and Pierce embraces the child she’s carrying, he receives news of his own wife’s death by suicide, and Pierce and Noel seem the same: rich men playing at bohemian business, as Lara and Mari take seriously their personal and artistic responsibilities. While Pierce quickly recovers from the news, thinking he and Mari can move on and be married, Mari “feels her own grief—and her guilt […] She never met Pierce’s wife, never knew her as anything more than a name, but she had sometimes felt like a third presence in Mari’s relationship, a ghost always haunting their steps” (200). This spectral presence haunting their relationship signifies more than the past—like the haunting of the villa, Frances’s ghostly lingering represents Mari’s own future. When Noel tells her to cut her ties, Mari listens.
As Mari grapples with cutting ties with Pierce and the past, Emily confronts her future—joined either to Chess or burdened with Matt, as Chess’s confession of her infidelity with Matt highlights how Femininity, Monstrosity, and Truth define Emily’s new path. Seeing the full range of Chess’s plans, finding Chess’s book, and discovering how much Matt wants to wound her, Emily takes on the mantle of Victoria, preparing to rise like Lilith from the hell she’s living. While her turn toward violence doesn’t occur until the end of Hawkins’s book, Emily’s embrace of Mari’s legacy hints at the book’s violent conclusion, even before she confirms the infidelity and lying between her ex-husband and best friend. After Chess lies to Emily—which Emily can’t yet prove—she thinks that she will “write a chapter about Mari’s mom, about Lilith and the connection between Marianne Godwick’s short story and Mari’s book […] About the ways in which a legacy is both a gift and a curse” (192). Haunted by her mother’s death, powered by her mother’s writing, Mari bequeaths unknowingly through her novel and her hidden diaries, the true nature of female power—the marriage of artistic inspiration and the birthright of pain, as a patriarchal system stymies female authorship. Becoming Victoria, claiming Lilith’s mantle, Emily transforms in the villa, when she walks by “one of the hallway mirrors, my face doesn’t even look like mine” (210). Seeing herself in the cover of Lilith Rising, Emily manifests the logic behind Mari’s title—one Mari claims is “a fitting title for a book about women, power, betrayal and survival” (211). At the end of Chapter 12, as Chess confesses, Emily reacts violently, expressing the female power of Lilith, Mari, and Victoria.
Related Titles
By Rachel Hawkins
