FOR A NOVEL focussed on female creatives, Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman (2024) opens with a somewhat beguiling line: “I want to read about women who can’t make things.” The comment comes from Nicola Long, a disaffected sculptor piecing together an income in London while also attempting to succeed creatively.
Upon reflection, it’s an understandable desire. After all, who has the time or energy to make things? Not Nicola, who shifts between low-paying jobs like tutoring an uninterested teen and working as a nurse at a preschool. In a moment of particularly acute exhaustion and artist’s block, Nicola inquires at the Feminist Assembly, an archive dedicated to preserving the history of women artists. She is pointed to an obscure ceramicist—or, rather, that obscure ceramicist’s letters, the artist’s half of a correspondence that lasted over a decade until her suicide in 1988. This artist, Donna Dreeman, was writing to her friend, Susan Baddeley; the two discussed everything from failed romantic relationships to their respective career pursuits (or lack thereof) and the trappings of modern womanhood.
As Nicola’s fervor for finding out more about Donna grows, readers are immersed in the late ceramicist’s story. The book’s early chapters are largely about Nicola’s creative block, job dissatisfaction, and flailing relationship; later ones center on Donna’s downfall and Susan’s quiet home life. “You don’t know how lucky you are!” Donna informs Susan, referencing her friend’s stable financial position and family unit. But to Susan, Donna’s words are a dig, eliciting the feeling of “stepping on a pin.” This triple excavation of interiority is a treat, as each woman’s psyche progressively reveals its own existential truths and confusions (Susan’s domesticity provides an especially potent foil to the two artists’ unconventional lifestyles).
Perhaps the true strength of The Last Sane Woman is in its prose: Regel possesses a gratifying ability to make the familiar unfamiliar (here, a swim cap isn’t just a swim cap but a “big, polished knee”). Her sentences are lyrical and stunning—exactly what one hopes for from a poet-turned-novelist like herself, who was also co-editor of the feminist art journal SALT. The result is an exquisite representation of what it means to create, maintain community, and make a living amid our contemporary malaise, executed with the precision and delicacy of a potter at the wheel. It’s a book at once comforting and uncanny, as readers who make art—or anyone, really, who has felt work impeding on the dignity and enjoyment of their only life—will find sharp and thought-provoking simulacra of their experiences on each page.
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As Nicola spends more afternoons at the archive immersed in the letters, we grow increasingly privy to the consciousnesses of Nicola, Susan, and Donna—quite literally, as Regel begins to play with form, switching perspectives at the turn of a paragraph. In this way, The Last Sane Woman evokes the style of narratological experimentalist writers like Virginia Woolf in (most famously) Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). During certain moments, readers consume Donna’s letters—which are italicized, a slanted second voice permeating the text—alongside Nicola as she combs through the correspondence at the archives:
[Nicola] pulled the letter out with quick fingers and began to read.
Dear Susan,
I found the most beautiful letter set at the craft market and couldn’t resist, even though I don’t really have anyone to write to. Everyone I know I could practically summon with a tin can. But then I thought to myself, what about Susan? You’re far enough away.
At other times, Regel brings Donna and Susan out of their epistolary universe and into the waking, contemporary world. Take, for example, the beginning of chapter four, where the narrative transitions directly from one of Donna’s letters into a description of her falling asleep over the page—and then to Nicola, copying out Donna’s words in the present moment:
I, on the other hand, am all form and no philosophy, and I live in fear of being outed as a fraud! It’s days like this I wonder if I shouldn’t just give it all up. Would you still write to me if I packed it all in to go and live in the wilderness?
Outside, the rain picks up again. Pattering against the window to the pace of Donna’s fluttering eyelids as her pen rolls to the floor. […]
I wonder if I shouldn’t just give it all up, copied out in pencil by Nicola Long.
Regel employs a similar technique when Donna discovers her boyfriend’s infidelity by finding another woman’s earring in her bedroom. “I have been staring at this godforsaken earring for so long, with all kinds of horrors raging through me,” Donna writes to Susan, enclosing the jewelry piece in the envelope. At the end of the letter, “Susan picks the broken earring back up, now imbued with personality […] She doesn’t want it either.” Susan’s interjections often feature suburban boredom, evoking a predictability and holistic stability that Donna lacks. Even so, “something about the earring and its winking disfigurement was laughing not at Donna but at her,” Susan thinks, yearning for a less normative lifestyle herself.
Occasionally, these switches in time and perspective can make it difficult to tease out an overall narrative arc. Yet despite the book’s backward and forward propulsions in time, it feels driven by a coherent set of interests and impulses. Moments from past and present roll into each other throughout the book, enmeshing the women’s lives into one dense, compelling story. When asked, for example, by the archive curator if she has evening plans, Nicola’s embarrassment about her lackluster social life takes the form of Donna’s italicized letter on the page, where Donna writes, “Have you ever felt you weren’t a viable proposition?”
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What does it mean to be an artist today? In the archives, Nicola searches for answers. After all, Woolf once observed that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” For her part, Nicola cites a striking resemblance between the doldrums of her existence and Donna’s. Marketing for this book encourages readers to entertain any and all parallels between the two creatives; the back cover cites a “litany of coincidences in the letters [that] start to chime uncomfortably.”
Yet—similar though the two women are—perhaps most resonant is the ubiquity of their artistic experiences, the commonness of the challenges Nicola and Donna as well as artists everywhere face in attempting to find creative community and success. Take, for example, Donna’s frustrations about the ostensible necessity of self-promotion or gimmicks alongside actual art-making: “The work should speak for itself. Except it never does.” She goes on to observe that “the only [artists who] get on in this world […] are those that have perfected speaking in its place. Cult of personality and all that.”
Of course, while Donna is speaking as part of the late 1970s London art scene, her words could just as easily be uttered in Nicola’s present (or, for that matter, ours). Nicola does as much shortly after, lamenting that “meetings with curators were fudgy and uncomfortable; gallery openings sank under the weight of warm beer, loose handshakes and forgotten names.” She similarly bemoans the unsatisfactory nature and faux intimacy of promoting artistic work online:
Nicola retreated to her bedroom […] illuminated by the lighthouse of her phone; posting photographs of the objects she’d made to the internet with the same fervour as she posted her face. But the praise was always as quick as it was impossible to hold. Compressed into numbers, then moved along by the date. The hearts swelled, and then they burst.
This ballooning, yet ultimately empty, melancholic sensation is one I’m all too familiar with. I post a piece of my own writing online, then wonder: Did anyone really read this? Do they see me? Do either of those things matter? Trade writing for any art form (painting, photography, music, performance), and I can attest to hearing similar anxieties from creative peers. Because, put bluntly, becoming a publicly successful artist today requires joining the digital fiefdom. Choose your own adventure: indoctrinate yourself in Donna’s “cult of personality,” engage in humorless self-promotion, beg for institutional support—or sink. Really, the very necessity of the choice elicits a sinking feeling either way.
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Regel captures our contemporary artistic conundrum achingly well. Yet the story also acts as a balm for despair (albeit a temporary one, perhaps not quite powerful enough to dispel the feeling indefinitely). This feels especially true when Regel places her characters in situations of occupational unrest. “I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be here,” Nicola repeats to herself during a particularly trying day at the nursery. Why? Because “she wanted so many other things. She wanted to be an artist. She wanted to be prettier than she was. She wanted her friends to listen to her when she spoke, and she wanted, more than anything, to rest for a little bit.”
Nicola’s plea for rest is an existential wail, a calling out to the void, and she soon quits working to focus entirely on the archive. In her letters, Donna expresses similar misgivings after beginning yet another service job to fund her art:
You are now reading the words of a bonafide Covent Garden waitress! Truth be told, the day before I started I could barely move, I was suddenly filled with all these horrible thoughts about going backwards. Always backwards, never forwards […] but I had no choice but to suck it up and get on with it because of course I’m broke … Honestly, work feels like a little rope tied around my ankle. I walk so far and feel free and like I might be getting somewhere and then the rope pulls taut and I have to retreat.
That enforced “retreat” is a real dynamic—for me and for others everywhere, artists or not. (Take, for example, the number of times I’ve stepped away from drafting this piece to write monotonous ad copy.) Ignore the little rope around your ankle for too long, favoring creative or passionate pursuits, and you’ll no doubt trip—or be wrenched back toward questions of rent or credit card payments or tuition or loans or electric bills. It doesn’t matter if you are ailing or exhausted or losing your grip on reality—there’s no choice but to, as Donna says, “suck it up and get on with it.”
It’s a painful truth, one whose lack of appeal is augmented by culture’s romanticization of “creative genius” and comparative hostility toward the working class: what we really need to access our creativity is the time, monetary backing, and, “more than anything, [a chance] to rest for a little bit.” After all, Nicola goes looking for women who can’t make things specifically because of barriers “like money […] or time.” Throughout Regel’s book, Nicola’s and Donna’s experiences highlight these uncomfortable realities about art-making in today’s world, truths that, again, Woolf famously put her finger on a century ago; most creatives struggle not from the mental block of wanting to create and not mustering the will to do so, but rather from the financial, institutional, and social constraints that inhibit them from carving out space for craft. Or, in more explicitly Woolfian terms: Nicola is one artist among many still searching for A Room of Her Own and 500 pounds a month—adjusted for inflation, of course.
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The title of Regel’s novel is a wink to the 20th-century British ceramicist Michael Cardew, who rejected modernist ideals and whom the writer Angela Carter once described as “the Last Sane Man in a crazy world.” The phrase later inspired the title of Tanya Harrod’s biography The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew; Modern Pots, Colonialism, and the Counterculture (2012). Harrod credits Cardew’s “sanity” to his dedication to a simple, art-focused lifestyle—Cardew believed all the ceramics he made should have an inherent use—and his disavowal of consumer capitalism. For most of his life, writes Harrod, Cardew “stayed a grand amateur” and “argued that making pots should be a part-time activity. Better work would be the result.”
It’s worth noting that Cardew was a complex and at times problematic figure whose intentionally “amateur” practice was partly possible due to familial wealth and status. Even so, Cardew’s memory acts as an omen for the protagonists in The Last Sane Woman, whose work remains forever considered amateur in a derogatory sense, undervalued by their creative peers and the world at large. Donna only finds true solace when two wealthy friends lend her their country home to make art in, on the condition that she will maintain the premises.
Tragically, if somewhat predictably, the arrangement falls through just as Donna finds her creative stride. She returns to London to live in relative squalor before eventually dying by suicide. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that,” she writes to Susan toward the book’s—and her life’s—end. “Tomorrow is all over everything, always rearing its ugly head just when I think I’ve gone and got it, like a mole with a hammer.” The invocation of Macbeth’s famous Act V soliloquy in her final letters foreshadows what readers already know: Donna will die, full of sound and fury that her work has been treated by others with “disregard verging on the conspiratorial,” herself convinced it has all signified nothing.
Nicola’s attempts to revive Donna’s work through a retrospective exhibition some three decades later are likewise thwarted. Emailing Susan for the first and only time, she asks permission to use their letters for the show, but Susan refuses, not replying, resisting Nicola’s assertion of creative connection with Donna, thinking to herself, “The nerve of it was almost laughable.” In the end, Susan asks that the letters be removed from the archive altogether, sensing that Nicola wants to revive her own creative reputation through Donna’s work, rather than honor Donna—an assumption that feels both made in bad faith and somewhat truthful.
I can’t help wondering, though, if the characters’ failures were the point all along. From the book’s first pages, Regel suggests that Donna and Nicola’s shared pursuit of fame is a poison. Whether or not that pursuit negates the practice of art-making altogether, it’s certainly a recipe for disappointment. Because, while we’re never privy to Nicola making art, for Donna, the actual process of creating pots is a flow state, “a little bit like gardening, or masturbating.” In other words, the ceramicist is at her happiest when making things, forgoing outside voices in favor of her own. When she lets her anxieties about legacy and success take hold, doubled with her taxing financial troubles, she’s miserable. The book isn’t intended to be didactic; still, the message isn’t exactly subtle. Perhaps Regel makes her fictional creative “mothers” suffer in The Last Sane Woman so that, in thinking back through them, we may avoid similar fates.
