The Last Sane Woman

by Hannah Regel

A beguiling debut novel about friendship and failure, written with unusual craft and spryness by an acclaimed poet

Nicola is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a university archive dedicated to women's art, because she 'wants to read about women who can't make things'.

There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman  –  a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola – to her friend, who is living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As she reads on, an acute sense of affinement turns to obsession, and she abandons one job after another to make time for the archive.

The litany of coincidences in the letters start to chime uncomfortably, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing what if she doesn't like what the letters lead to?

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Art, Horror, Novels, 21st Century

Kindle Edition

First published July 2, 2024

Reviews

[emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

lowkey how it feels currently

there have been books i haven't wanted to pick up, and books i've questioned whether i want to continue reading, but this is the very first one i kept forgetting about.

in the middle of a chapter, my mind would wander, and i'd look at my phone or google something or — and this happened multiple times — just move to another book, only to see it open a few hours later and realize i'd been in the middle of a sentence.

this happened at least a dozen times.

this book never held my attention because it asked more from me than i wanted to give it. depth did not belie its crypticness and confusion, and it took a good deal of energy without much payoff.
 
in other words, i found it really boring.

to me, lit fic about an obsessive woman losing her mind is the height of entertainment usually. but neither of these women (both allegedly artists) ever really do or create anything, or have unique voices from each other (every chapter was a rush to figure out whose perspective i was in until a name i recognized).

discombobulating.

bottom line: threatened to drive me insane.

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm sorry but this really wasn't for me. I gave it one star because I finished it but it gave me a headache in the process.

I try to look for something good in every book I read but I was struggling from the beginning with this. In fact it took me four attempts to get past the first 30 pages. I simply couldn't get a grip on what it was trying to tell me.

The story appears simple - a woman, Nicola Long, is searching for purpose and comes across letters written by a potter - Donna Drennan - to her friend, Susan Baddesley. All we know about Donna is that she had some mild success at the start of her career but then struggled and finally ended her own life. The recipient of the letters had given them to an archive of/for women (The Feminist Assembly).

And that's all I can tell you. The prose rambles around from person to person without any discernible breaks so you become bewildered (until a name is mentioned) as to who you are reading about. (Maybe that was the point?) The metaphors come thick and fast at times and are often totally nonsensical ("chattering like a tin can"?)

As far as I could see none of the women did anything particularly useful they just complained about not knowing what to do. Donna and Nicola both seem to squander opportunities and ramble about living here and there and wondering why they aren't successful. They both drove me mad with their apathy. You barely get to know Susan except to learn that she stayed in touch with Donna and kept her letters.

As I say I do try to find something good but I failed. Mea culpa. I also never worked out who the "last sane woman" was. Certainly not I by the end of this book.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Verso Books for the advance review copy.

[Krista · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean. Like money,” Nicola added, “or time.”
Doubt.

The Last Sane Woman is one of those confusing novels that makes my brain fire on all cylinders: format illuminates theme, messy but relatable characters unveil something true about humanity in the moment, and meaning comes as an epiphany in its aftermath. Debut novelist Hannah Regel, primarily known as a poet, writes with an impressionist’s sensibility — POV changes abruptly, long passages read as out-of-place metaphors, close-up details are fuzzy until one stands back and considers the whole — and throughout, she includes so much truth about women: about how they present themselves, their friendships, and their place in the arts. If I had written a review immediately, I might have rounded this down to four stars, but the more I think about it, the more I like it: rounding up to five. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Reading was easy. All she had to do was sit very still and the world would shift; inviting her in as a citizen, liking a tweet because it was true enough she could have written it. Watching, Nicola soon learnt, was also a form of taking part. A form that, sitting at her quiet desk in the Feminist Assembly, she felt impossible to get wrong.

On its surface, this is a story of a young ceramicist, Nicola — newly graduated from art school and feeling directionless — who (more or less on a whim) inquires at a nonprofit archive of women’s work in the arts if they had any material on those women who had had difficulty with “making things”. The archivist gives her a never-before-explored box of letters written by a female potter who had killed herself in the 1980s without making a name for herself, and Nicola is immediately fascinated by the biography revealed by this one-sided correspondence between this unnamed potter (she always signs her name in “XX” kisses) and the mysterious “Susan” to whom she bares all. The further Nicola reads, the more she recognises correspondences with her own life and work, and tension arises as she realises she might be on the brink of uncovering a mystery. But that’s just the surface plot. (I don’t really consider what follows a spoiler, per se, but I enjoyed discovering these things on my own, so, forewarned.)

I always look for the inspiration for a book’s title while reading and the phrase “the last sane woman” doesn’t appear in this one. And when I googled it, the closest I came was an article from The Guardian with AS Byatt’s review of The Last Sane Man by Tanya Harrod. As Byatt explains: “The last sane man" was a phrase used by Angela Carter to describe the potter, Michael Cardew. "Sane" in this context is associated with a simple life, and the ideal of the human as artist, art and life as one continuous work. (Further sleuthing and I learned that Angela Carter coined this phrase in her 1978 review of a monograph written on Cardew by Garth Clark.) Reading Byatt’s review, I could see where Regel took some points of inspiration from the life of this well-known male artist — and especially where it explains that Cardew attempted to shape public perception of his life with the letters he wrote; that makes for interesting speculation on how literally we are to interpret our own potter’s writings — but what I loved about this off-the-page research was that I felt like the character Nicola: acknowledging that art history is predominantly the story of men and trying to understand where our anonymous female potter might fit in.

The format of this novel, as I said above, is not straightforward. POV shifts between Nicola’s life in modern-day London, passages that she reads from the letters — that can then suddenly shift to the potter going about her own life in the London of 30-40 years ago — and scenes from the POV of Susan, and how she reacts to the letters of her freewheeling friend (whom she does name for the reader) as she deals with denying her own artistic aspirations to become a young wife and mother. And frequently, Regel writes in long, confusing metaphors:

The knuckle inside Susan, swelling with what she had failed to understand, turned purple with pride in her throat. The colour grew elbows, firmly in place, unable to interrupt. She had driven for eighteen years in the rain and she’d be damned if she unravelled now. And besides, she thought, it would be beyond absurd to alert a stranger to the black pool of solvents, dyes and fatty acids still bleeding out from under her chair and onto her feet, especially one in the middle of a monologue. She pulled a fitted sheet over her own stupidity and smoothed it out, waiting patiently for her accident to dry and for Marcella to finish.

But as confusing as the POV shifts and the metaphorical passages can be, taken together, they seem to be the prose equivalent of the groundbreaking multimedia art that the potter creates:

Face taut, she begins to arrange the shards. Working urgently with chapped hands she slathers ceramic mortar onto their new joins, following the contours of their freshly broken edges with intuitive speed. This way, the fragments shape themselves. Up, up. She chews her lip in concentration. Spots of blood rise from under the skin to meet the air that flaked them. She stands back to inspect her work. What does it want? Legs. Filling her nails with dirt she quickly folds the form back in on itself, hollowing it out before it sets, and gives the next instruction. Nerves. She hurries through a box of discarded farming tools and bits of machinery, collected on her evening walks through the fields. Without gloves she grabs at a spoke to free it from its wheel, ripping one and then another like screeching hairs, her palms now streaked in scars of rust. Strange fronds. She works them into the form like whiskers. Weirdly delicate. Freshly desperate. Not even pots anymore but innervated beings.

Standing back from The Last Sane Woman, I can see where Regel dirtied her hands with muck and rust; this is art and there is truth at the heart of it, and what more could I want?

A rather grinding autobiography, isn’t it? Same old, same old, but it can’t be helped. Life, when it is happening, doesn’t care to tell you which part is telling and what it tells. That is the frustration. I suppose all this aimless rambling is caught up in feelings of pointlessness and futility and the ever-increasing sense of ageing into an absence where every addition feels like a load, wiping tables, wedging clay.

Most importantly, this is a feminist story of an anonymous woman artist, forgotten to history: the story of what she actually did, how she presented that to her best friend, how that friend interpreted events through her own experiences, and how bringing forward the forgotten stories inspires a new generation. The format does echo the potter’s nontraditional creations, and that’s what makes this art: it may not be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly was to mine.

[cass krug · Rating 5 out of 5]

you know when a book just WORKS for you? i devoured this - started it during a morning off from work, and nearly finished it during a power outage that night. something about it just absolutely clicked with me and i loved it. thank you to verso and netgalley for the digital copy! i’ve already preordered a physical copy for my bookshelf 🫡

the last sane woman weaves together the lives of 3 different women. we have present-day nicola, who is feeling lost and directionless after studying art at university; donna, a sculptor creating in the 1970s and 1980s and drifting from opportunity to opportunity; and donna’s best friend susan, leading a conventional life with a house, husband, and baby. when nicola discovers letters that donna wrote to susan in a feminist art archive, she becomes obsessed with how similar her and donna are.

the writing here is DELICIOUS. so rich and detailed and it’s evident that regel is a poet-turned-novelist, but in the best way possible. the combination of scenes from each of the women’s lives mixed with excerpts of the letters that donna wrote to susan made the book compulsively readable. there is a web of other people that the three main characters are connected to that made the reading experience so immersive. it explores female friendship, the issue of finding your purpose in life, the struggle of whether or not to live a traditional domestic life, and the way that female artists are erased from history.

think of this as the contemporary counterpart to lisa tuttle’s my death (one of my other favorite reads of the year) but hold the metaphysical craziness. there’s that same thread of finding an artist that you feel so connected to, that you feel like you are one and the same. the picture of donna that is painted by her letters has a lot of gaps that nicola is unable to fill in, and those gaps allow nicola to really project herself onto donna, but as readers we get to fill in some of the blanks through the scenes from donna’s life.

i thought the way this played with form and explored the ideas it presents was so engaging, and i’m obsessed with regel’s writing style. can’t wait to see what she does next!

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

girl it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl

[Johann (jobis89) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Last Sane Woman follows Nicola Long who is searching for a purpose when she comes across letters that have been written by a mildly successful potter to her friend.

And yes it is as boring as it sounds. Maybe that’s a little harsh… but it simply wasn’t for me. There was a lot of meandering and the narrative jumped around and you couldn’t work out who you were actually reading about until a name was dropped that helped you place the story. Too much hard work for me and absolutely zero pay off. Struggling to think of anything positive to note - I guess the writing was beautiful at points?? That’s all I got. 2 stars.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the premise of this book — exploring the failures of interpretation when reading someone else’s life is very up my street — but wasn’t wowed by it overall. There were so many characters, perspective shifts so frequently, I found it hard to empathise with any of them. Donna and Susan’s friendship is frequently cited but there wasn’t enough to convince me that the two women got on at all, let alone loved each other (admittedly hard when we’ve only got half the correspondence). Also found the characterisation of Susan a bit tedious — she wasn’t afforded much complexity until the very end, and spent most of the book as a stereotypical foil to Donna’s life, cast as boring and oppressed just because she had chosen to get married and have children fairly young. I suppose the point was that Donna saw her in this light, but I hoped the sections from Susan’s perspective might challenge this and demonstrate that she was just as nuanced as her friend was. There were a few moments when Regel hinted at this but could have been developed more.

[Sophia Eck · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Last Sane Woman curiously threads three women together in uncanny ways through a collection of personal archived letters. We meet Nicola, Susan, and Donna; In the ‘70s, Donna wrote dozens of letters to her close friend, Susan, and in today’s timeline, Nicola, a aspiring ceramicist, as was Donna, reads these letters by accessing them in a feminist archive. Nicola feels an unnerving but captivating sense of alignment with the Donna she meets in these letters penned to Susan, and becomes enamored with both the letters and the women’s existence and their contents, almost to an obsessive degree. All three women, despite their differences, toe a line between a personally conceived of success and the insanity of perceived failure, yet they all attempt to maintain an image of direction and purpose, even often to each other. Nicola is repeatedly pressured by others in the artist community to monetize these letters in a way, and this pressure and Nicola’s apprehension to share these personally impactful writings really serve as an example of the conflicting decisions artists and archivists face of whether to publish and/or monetize the personal, whether to exploit a work for praise and money or hold it close to the chest and keep it safe from prying and critical eyes. This book reminded me a bit of My Death by Lisa Tuttle, similar in their theme of identifying oneself uncannily in another persons artistic creation, and whether to use that commonality to create something new or withhold it tightly as a secret comfort. I saw some comment that it was hard to follow, but for me, after the first few entries, I was able to find my footing and I really liked the way the women dared to blend together a little, yet I feel still maintained distinct attitudes and demeanors. So often I find pieces of myself in the works of other women, from any number of time periods and places and ages, and it feels like what Nicola says here: “The thrill pulled a thread across her chest; Nicola wasn’t just overhearing, she was being overheard!” Sometimes someone else puts what you feel into words so apt it’s as if you were overheard in your own attempt at expression, and given a helping hand.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very different read -i love a book about letters going back and forth for years and keeping in touch so long and with such attachment and devotion. The main character Donna a potter struggling to be known and living off the kindness of friends or friends of friends.Moving from living situations sometimes having to leave her pottery behind. she has affairs with several men passing through none serious.People get very tired of her drunkeness and picking up after it. I have a longtime penpal a poet on a hilltop farm in New England,i am the letter writer in my small world, a few friends still write to me and i try very hard to keep doing so. I have written long love letters on yellow pads and endless card and postcards, those connections mean the world to me and always will. It was a very sad and restless novel and i believe many are treading water keeping their heads up and so hoping someone will love them.

[Quill&Queer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I spent this whole book wondering what the story was trying to tell me, and unfortunately by the end of it it seemed to have no idea either. This flitted between three POVs, Donna in the past, writing letters to her friend, Susan, Susan herself in the past and present, and Nicola, who finds Donna's letters in an archive and becomes strangely obsessed with them.

I think the issue was Nicola herself. If this had just about the letters between Donna and Susan, showing the differences between the two friend's lives, this could have been such an interesting story. But we only got Donna's letters, not Susan's, and Nicola just wasn't an interesting character to read about.

If I concentrate on just Nicola, all I can really tell you about her is that she's a woman drifting through life, who latches onto Donna's letters like a leech and decides they're so alike. She makes an insane decision when her possession of the letters is threatened later in the story, and then the story just. Ends. It didn't feel like a finished book.

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Major thanks to NetGalley and Verso Fiction for providing an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:

*3.5

Centering a female artist at wits end, she discovers another female artist 30 years her senior, dead, through letters that focus on art, productivity, all in and around the female body.

Funny. Odd. Spirited. It's a long stretch of a character study in trying to place the what matters most between past and present, all to realize we're all going through the same shit, just at different times.

Interesting and bold. I'm not sure if it holds up as it warrants a reread, but it's Woolfian in its attempt, but lackluster due to being a classic DWM (in a time we are spoiled with too many of this genre) with a writing style that doesn't know how to move from poetry to the novel form.

[kari trail · Rating 3 out of 5]

“i want to read about women who can’t make things.”

it really checked all the boxes for my favorite kind of book (gorg prose writing, spiraling fem protagonist, commentary on objects, a touch existential) but i left feeling a little disappointed and confused… there was so much potential for the characters but they felt somehow mundane and deficient, and ultimately left me a bit stumped at the end. why was the first page the best in the whole book? in all fairness i read this while i was sick so maybe one day i’ll revisit it with a healthy brain and it will change my life. i did really love regal’s writing and her quirky metaphors—many good bits to underline in here!

“from the centre of her still body she’d draw the silence in, slowly smoothing the chaos out into a great expanse of untouched snow, ready for another day.”

“why i constantly subject myself to these ritual assassinations i’ll never know.”

“all the conversations that constituted her life existed in a hurricane of data which even she didn’t consider worthy of requesting, as was her right. the nearest she’d stretch to was a screenshot, for ‘proof.’”

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a lot in this book that resonates, and it seems the author has had some very similar experiences and thoughts as me, which is always special in a book. I like the way the letters of this novel are used to pull us back and forwards through time as we explore the lives, the boldened fronts and hidden realities of these women. At times, the prose would go quite poetic in a way that took me out of the reading experience and lumbered the pace, introducing metaphors or motifs that didn’t feel quite so grounded as the rest. But then again, these female characters were also unmoored and fleeting between moments and senses so I guess it was a fair artistic choice.

[Grace Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

not quite what i expected, and took a bit for me to get into a groove. but once i hit that groove, i really fell for this one. deliriously beautiful writing. this book won't be for everyone, but i'm glad it was for me.

[Lexi · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Wanted to like this so much more.

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes overwritten and I’m not sure I get why it ends where it does, but on the whole a very strong debut. Lots of ideas executed brilliantly and highlighted in my ebook.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.75

Started off strong: gorgeous imagery & writing lives that blend into each others but identities stay distinct is hard to do. There were passages in this that felt dreamlike and the author got the nail on the head with the depiction of the creative/art worlds externally and internal creative processes.

However, a lot of characters were introduced that just had nothing done with them and the ping ponging between the three women ended up quite tiresome as I felt I could never get to know the characters as deeply as I thought I would. I was also unsure of the message of this book. Not that I think every narrative needs a point per se, but this book presented ideas of art through a feminist lens and then just fell flat with them. I think it could have benefited from a bit of focus on what it set out to do, a lot of it felt wasted.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, I think it’s a me problem!! I thought I was going to absolutely love this but I don’t think I was in the right mood to read this. It’s quite slow and very character-focused, which typically I’m all for, but this one just fell flat. It would also get a bit muddled and confusing with the lack of quotation marks and frequent narrative/timeline shifts in the middle of the chapters. There was some really nice, sublime writing but it also edged on being too poetic.

I think this will be a big hit for a more niche group, and possibly if I re-visited at a different time, but it wasn’t quite for me.

Thank you to NegGalley and Verso Fiction for the ARC.

[lotte]

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the saddest woman of them all (incl. lezer)?

[zeynep · Rating 4 out of 5]

continuing with my theme of reading about the intersection of gender and making art (rachel cusk’s parade was one of my favourite reads of the year, so far) i read the last sane woman. in the opening line of the first chapter, one of the novel’s protagonists, nicola, says: “i want to read about women that can’t make things.” that’s an appropriate description of the book—everything that goes into women making art and everything that pushes back. why they may not be able to, what inhibits them?

the book isn’t an essay, however, broken down in a fictional context. it weaves an engaging story, painting a portrait of the artist around whom the story is built, donna. nicola is a struggling artist herself, discovering donna through the letters she wrote her friend susan throughout her life, many years after donna’s death. the letters resonate so deeply with nicola reading them becomes an obsession, and deeper parallels form between the life of donna, in the past, and nicola, now.

while all three of the central women—donna, nicola, and susan—are followed in third person, the book also includes the letters themselves that donna wrote to susan. the letters are messy and unsure, but written with such a distinct voice it strikes you with its complete sincerity. chronicling maybe a decade of donna’s struggling as an artist, it presents the reader, in unflinching detail, what goes in to the vague sentiment of being an artist, what someone might put up with in pursuit of it.

this book is for anyone who has ever felt unsure of themselves, who has doubted if they have been truly and irreversibly wrong when it comes to the choices they’ve made—related to art. Or otherwise. and of course, it’s also about the strength (stubbornness?) that means you can never stop, never give it up entirely. i know i’ll find myself retuning to the last sane woman time and time again in the future.

thank you so much to verso books and netgalley for the arc!

[Sofía · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me encantó. Me recordó a Sally Rooney, en el sentido de saber expresar muy bien las angustias de una mujer joven contemporánea (Nicola) con conciencia social y política que no sabe muy bien cómo enfocar sus objetivos artísticos en un sistema diseñado para asfixiar todo espíritu crítico y sensible. Muy bien llevado el paralelismo a través de los años con otro de los personajes principales, una chica (Donna) viviendo experiencias similares a ella pero décadas atrás. Susan completa el mural de personalidades interesantes y genuinas que podemos explorar en esta novela.

[Sophy H · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange and unusual book this was. For the first few chapters, I felt as though I was trying to read something hidden behind a veil, like I couldn't really get a good look at things or a hold on the scenarios being described. There felt to me a great sense of disorientation, perhaps intentional by the author, perhaps not? Then there seemed to be a gear change and the story really came into its own. I started getting invested in the characters, recognising and empathising with the futility of hated jobs, unwanted career paths and life stagnancy. The linking of the three different women, Nicola, Donna and Susan was very cleverly handled, whilst the side characters were equally well padded and realistic.
The ending felt somewhat ambiguous, once again entering behind the veil of abstruseness, yet somehow it worked and I felt satisfied in my reading.

A 4 star curious read.

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this. i want to analyze & internalize it.

regel has such a fantastic voice & the artistry of it intensified throughout the read

made me feel a lot… i was entranced at some points (like nicola lol)

i just really love how regel played with the conventions of narrative & time & perspective

so good im inspired … but maybe a little depressed

[Olivia Peltier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicola Long is a young ceramic artist caught in the slog of day-to-day life in London. No longer making--and growing increasingly depressed and dejected amid the rat race--she finds herself at the Feminist Assembly. The FA is a small archive dedicated to preserving the record of female artists. The archivist suggests to her a collection of letters written by another potter to her childhood friend throughout her many years of the same struggle to work, live, create, and find a place in the art world, spanning some years of the 1970s and 80s. Nicola is told that the artist took her own life, but little else, including her name.

Nicola finds many uncanny similarities between herself and the potter and becomes a little more than fascinated with her. Jumping between present-day Nicola, text from the letters, and past potter, Regel weaves the stories of three women beautifully together across time. Nicola (and Regel) highlight stories of forgotten women. Regel's languid writing captures Nicola and the potter's devolutions into madness of equal measure. There is some really beautiful writing here, making The Last Sane Woman not only an alluring story but a true work of art to read. An interest in or knowledge of art is certainly not necessary to enjoy this novel but is an added bonus for those in that camp.

[Jessica Sklar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing was inherently wrong with this but I just didn’t care about a single character

[Pia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5⭐️

[Salomée Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Max Dunphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

First book on good reads my girlfriend got it me.

Felt slow in places but a must read for any Londoner!

[Piper Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is the perfect combination of everything i love in a book. i was immediately in love with this and i couldn’t figure out why until the book name dropped i capture the castle. i can see the inspiration of that book on every page of this novel and i love it so much. i think this is one i will have to revisit! i highly recommend you pick this up when it releases in july if you are into books about women and girlhood and love the epistolary style :-)

[Astrid · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will need to re read this again to understand it fully which I love… books you can revisit and learn from are rare and vital.