Glenn Close’s performance in Stephen Frears’s 1988 film adaptation does not disappoint. As precise a portrait of a psychopath as any in literature.
Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangéreuses by Choderlos de Laclos (1782). Lewis was a teenage show-jumper, and this tale of sex, power and addiction on the US equestrian circuit is as brilliant as it’s chilling. Tory, the charismatic but damaged object of the female narrator’s desire in Heather Lewis’s 1994 novel House Rules. But when you meet them, you can’t look away. Like Villanelle, they’re not exactly role models. Here are five female antagonists who have struck a chord with me, and may well have left their mark on Villanelle.
Having said that, I’ve always been fascinated by anarchic women in literature and cinema. Which is another way of saying that I really don’t know. I’ve often been asked where Villanelle, the assassin of the Killing Eve series, ‘came from,’ and the only true answer I can give is that she came from my imagination.
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