43 pages • 1 hour read
A Week in Winter
A 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 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Walls”
Ann and Charlie Wall, who refer to themselves collectively as “The Walls,” have a close and devoted marriage. One of their favorite activities is to enter contests together. They have become very proficient at it and won a great deal of prizes. For their upcoming 25th anniversary, they decide to win themselves a holiday. Their top choice is a luxury stay in Paris. However, they are horrified to learn they have only won second place, a week’s stay at Stone House, instead. They arrive in Stoneybridge heartbroken at being cheated out of their Paris trip. Chicky compliments them on their successful marriage, revealing that she was one of the competition judges. When pressed, Chicky explains that the first-place winner submitted song lyrics instead of an essay as instructed. The Walls are incensed. Later, they commiserate together at a pub and the bartender compliments them on their seemingly healthy relationship. Several nights later, The Walls tell the other guests about their specialty in contest winning. The others are impressed, and they all decide to enter a contest together. They choose a competition to invent a new local festival and debate possibilities. That night, The Walls phone the hotel in Paris to sneakily check on the first-place winners. Ann pretends to be calling in an official capacity and asks the woman for feedback on the prize. She and Charlie learn that the prize did not deliver what was promised, and the winners are very dissatisfied. This report makes The Walls feel much better. The next day, the group compiles their festival ideas and decides to submit a festival of friendship.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Miss Nell Howe”
Miss Howe is the principal of a girls’ school, where she is approaching retirement. She is universally disliked, and her office is impersonal and austere. Her assistant, Irene, is completely different: she is friendly and well liked, and she strives to bring life into the dismal space. Irene often defends Miss Howe against those who disparage her. The other teachers ask Irene for ideas on Miss Howe’s retirement gift, so Irene finds an excuse to stop by Miss Howe’s house. However, Miss Howe rebuffs and insults her, leading Irene to give up any pretense at friendship. Once outside the house, Irene feels ill. A neighbor, Fiona, invites her in for tea. There, Irene crosses paths with a delivery man named Dingo, who offers to drive her home. He tells Irene about his uncle, Nasey; later, Dingo encourages Nasey to give Irene a call. The two begin seeing each other, and Nasey gets along well with Irene’s mother and nephew, who is really her son (the child of unmarried parents). Soon, they become engaged.
Nasey suggests a trip to Stone House as Miss Howe’s retirement gift. Miss Howe hears about Irene’s engagement and is secretly hurt at not being informed; however, she deflects by insulting Irene’s relationship. She attends her retirement party at the school unenthusiastically and offers Irene an engagement present. Irene is shocked and touched until she opens it and realizes it was intended as a retirement gift for Miss Howe. Once Miss Howe is gone, another, more cheerful principal takes her place and forms a warm friendship with Irene. A man calls the office looking for Miss Howe, but Irene informs him she no longer works there.
One day, Irene passes Miss Howe in the street and invites her for coffee. She tells her about the phone call, which Miss Howe believes was her estranged brother. Shortly after, Irene and Nasey are married. At Stone House, Miss Howe is bitter and unfriendly to everyone. To spare Chicky her company, Rigger agrees to drive Miss Howe to the market. They talk about their families, and Rigger tells Miss Howe about his past in reform school. The next day, Miss Howe visits Carmel and is derisive toward her family. Carmel retaliates and asks Miss Howe to leave. To her horror, Miss Howe begins to cry. She confesses the truth about her estranged brother, Martin, and how she herself inadvertently broke up her family when she revealed her mother’s affair. At that point, her brother became involved with a bad crowd. Embarrassed at her confession, Miss Howe leaves angrily. That evening, she leaves Stone House for good.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Freda”
Since childhood, Freda has had insight about the future and about hidden secrets. When she grows up, she becomes a librarian. One day, her sister announces that she expects her boyfriend to propose; Freda instinctively knows that the man is planning to break up with her instead. At her library job, Freda plans a “Friends of the Library” series of meetings to improve the library, in spite of her boss’s disapproval. Freda discusses her plan with her best friend Lane and her aunt Eva, a birdwatching columnist with an eclectic style. After the first Friends meeting, a bouquet of flowers is sent to the library. Freda’s boss claims them, but Freda knows they were meant for her. The next time Lane and Eva go to the library, they see Freda in conversation with a man named Mark. He asks Freda to go to dinner with him, and the two begin dating.
Mark tells Freda he’s working on the redevelopment of a local hotel. As their relationship progresses, Lane expresses her mistrust in Mark. Meanwhile, Freda continues developing her Friends program with a lecture on technology. As Freda considers her new relationship, she sees a vision of a woman she suspects to be Mark’s wife. Later, she has a vision of Mark at work berating a woman from the hotel. Freda begins shirking her library duties and her friends in favor of Mark, causing Lane to resent her. To reconcile them, Freda invites Lane and Eva for dinner during a week when Mark is away. They make up, but are interrupted by a call from Mark to the restaurant. Lane suggests Mark was calling to verify Freda’s whereabouts.
Later, Lane and Eva go to lunch together and see Mark dining with his wife and child. He sees them and becomes enraged. Before they can tell Freda, Mark accosts Freda himself at a hotel reception and accuses her of spying on him. He tells Freda to remove herself from his life completely, and Freda is heartbroken. To help her recover, Eva arranges for Freda to spend a week at Stone House. Freda spends the week getting to know the other guests. She becomes particularly attached to the house cat, Gloria. She privately confesses her psychic gift to Chicky, who encourages her to share it with the others. The other guests are surprisingly open and supportive, and Freda foretells happy futures for them all. Before long, it is time for everyone to go home and begin their new lives.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
This closing section explores the remainder of the house’s guests, all of whom contrast each other in different ways and whom, in a broader sense, contrast with the characters of the previous sets of chapters. The Walls are perhaps the most comical characters, presented as even more intrinsically intertwined with one another than Henry and Nicola. Unlike many other characters, The Walls have faced very little hardship and live in a content, confident bubble. That bubble is soured as they earn only second place, rather than first place, in their holiday competition, which leads them to Stone House. Ironically, though, the second-place holiday prompts The Walls to lower their walls, in a sense, encouraging the somewhat isolated couple to expand their bubble. The stay brings The Walls closer to their estranged children—a dynamic directly inverted from Anders’s experience with his father. In addition, though they are initially antagonistic toward the entire experience, their reluctance wears down when they find an appreciative audience for their unique skill set. That the first-place winners are left dissatisfied by their dream holiday suggests that The Walls are a unique manifestation of the theme of The Internal Versus External Self; while previous characters engaging with this theme have struggled to find balance with their powerful external selves, The Walls begin the narrative entirely absorbed in their shared internal identity. Their story culminates in the inception of a “festival of friendship,” mirroring the friendship that has grown between the hosts and guests.
Directly contrasting this outcome is the following chapter on Miss Howe, a woman devoid of the capacity for friendship who again offers a fresh perspective on the novel’s themes, in this case, Personal Transformation and Healing and Redemption. Although never overtly stated (and certainly Miss Howe is presented as a negative character), there are hints of a potential neurodivergency that may account for the distance and misunderstandings from those around her. Miss Howe is juxtaposed against her assistant, Irene, who was briefly mentioned earlier in the novel as the woman to whom Nasey became engaged. Unlike the other characters, Miss Howe does not undergo a dramatic internal change or learn from her mistakes. She represents someone too deeply entrenched in her own negativity to be open to growth and love, and as such, she serves as a warning of what awaits those unwilling or unable to find the courage to change. At one point, during her conversation with Carmel, Miss Howe faces her vulnerability but ultimately finds it impassable. Her story shows that there are limits to the transformative power of friendship and the natural world.
Miss Howe’s story ends with her removing herself from Stone House and allowing the narrative to pass into Freda’s story, which by the nature of Freda’s gift hints at the cyclical nature of self-growth and personal change. Despite being situated at the end of the novel, Freda’s sight allows her to see into the future, tying her to the possibility of new beginnings. Her chapter opens by shifting backwards in time to Freda’s childhood. At this point, the novel takes a slight turn toward the extraordinary in contrast to its preceding realism. As an adult, Freda becomes involved with her local library and fights to implement a “Friends of the Library” scheme—a movement that directly parallels the house’s “festival of friendship” pitch. However, Freda’s own friendships begin to unravel as she shifts her priorities and her judgment toward her new relationship. Her experience is similar to Chicky’s, helping to bookend the novel with two reflective stories. Each becomes blindsided by an apparent love, only to be cast aside to begin anew. When Freda arrives at Stone House, her story becomes interspersed with those of others as her visions give her insight into what’s happening beneath the surface. By the end of the novel, she is able to redeem herself for some of her mistakes and make peace with who she is by using her visions to bring peace to others. The narrative closes by briefly reverting to Chicky’s perspective, bringing her experience full circle.
Unlock all 43 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
