Book review of “The Last Sane Woman” by Hannah Regel

This interpersonal dynamic – a veritable jumble of subjectivities – creates an unstable narrative context in which the story being told cannot easily be reconciled with the story being read. The solid ground of mutual understanding crumbles, and everyone inevitably makes a little mistake.

Hannah Regel’s fictional debut, The Last Sane Woman, is a novel about writing and reading letters, and so it is also a story about misinterpretation. These misinterpretations are painful for the three women at the center of the work – the letter writer, her intended recipient, and 30 years later, a second, unexpected reader – and they hinder the intimacy the two share. “How much you had to listen through the noise of your own feedback to get the truth (of friendship),” reflects one of the book’s main arguments. “How easy it was to misread something.”

Regel could have trusted the reader to reach this conclusion even without such explicit clues, for The Last Sane Woman is an evocative, aching allusion to the epistolary tradition. The narrative combines omniscience with the first-person form of written correspondence, frequently shifting perspective within a chapter and sometimes even within paragraphs. This patchwork structure mimics the characters’ fragmented attention, the everyday disruptions that impair the ability to write or read. But more powerfully, it positions the letters as common terrain, a shared but combative psychic space in which three women clash, rubbing their different realities against one another and creating chasms of misunderstanding and, in the worst cases, delusion.

The novel begins with Nicola Long, a young, conflicted woman with a degree in sculpture. After graduating, she moved to London, determined to pursue her creative ambitions, but a few years later, “she hadn’t caught what she saw coming.” Instead, she makes a living at a tedious, dead-end job, and her artistic drive is displaced by inertia and malaise. One day, Nicola stumbles upon the Feminist Assembly, “a small, underfunded archive devoted to the art of women,” and enters with the aim of “reading about women who can’t make”—that is, “about the difficulties a person might have in making things. About what might stop a person from…making art. …Like money.”

Nicola’s choice of words suggests that she is not looking for inspiration, but rather for a less electrifying effect: the satisfaction of a response? The permission to give up on a dream? In any case, she has come to the Feminist Assembly to “revel” and not to be motivated.

Archivist Marcella Goodwoman directs Nicola to a series of letters written by a potter to her friend Susan Baddeley over the course of 12 years – from 1976 to 1988, when she supposedly committed suicide. The potter, the reader learns, is a woman named Donna Dreeman, but she never identifies herself in the correspondence, and Marcella cannot remember her name. (Susan’s letters to Donna are not included in the series, and the reader only ever receives part of one of them.)

Donna’s anonymity makes her the ideal canvas for Nicola’s projections. She is a character, more fiction than flesh, and her letters form a serial story that Nicola follows with rapidly increasing obsession. She seizes on accidental similarities, desperate to find the stabilizing coherence of fate: she and Donna grew up in the same town; they both went to school to study ceramics. Eventually, Nicola stops working so she can devote her days to poring over Donna’s correspondence, copying out passages and, when the resonance of Donna’s impressions becomes too overwhelming, “pressing her forehead against the page… to take it in completely.”

Regel is a poet: she published two volumes of poetry before this novel, When I Was Alive (2017) and Oliver Reed (2020). In The Last Sane Woman, she brings the same keen eye for human idiosyncrasies and the same intuitive, powerful command of figurative language. When Donna writes to Susan, “You don’t know how lucky you are!”—noting the assured predictability of her life—Susan feels “like stepping on a pin.” Nicola fantasizes about having a piece of her skull removed to “let the miracle in once more.” Yet for all the joy of Regel’s precise, carnal imagery, it sometimes has the effect of unifying the three women’s perceptions in a way that counteracts her astute, often heartbreaking portrayal of women too narrow-minded by their discontent to see others with clarity.

Nicola’s obsession with Donna is rooted in a hungry, needy desire: to establish her own artistic legacy by securing Donna’s posthumously – to unite their goals, their ambitions. But one wonders if Nicola could have even guessed at her. When one’s vision is clouded by meanings we have imposed on her, the text before us will be difficult to discern.

Rachel Vorona Cote is the author of “Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Limit Women Today.”