Anna de Vivo The Last Sane Woman , Hannah Regel, Verso, 2024, 240 pages, £10.99 > > John Ruskin would write that to advance art, ‘men’s lives must be given’. In her debut novel, The Last Sane Woman , Hannah Regel pushes this sentiment to a dooming extreme.
Built around the pull of the archives and exhibited through sinuous epistolary speculations, the novel forms itself around the forgotten letters of Donna Dreeman, an obscure potter whom we immediately learn commits suicide, and to whom her directionless artist-protagonist Nicola Long repeatedly returns . To an outsider with impatient eyes, there is nothing particularly remarkable about Donna. Her letters, like her works of clay, have been long-ignored and she received little acclaim within her lifetime.
And yet, for Nicola, Donna’s life feels nostalgic. As she becomes absorbed by the life and losses she finds between these lines, her letters are a familiar exploration into fatigued feelings of creative futility : both women are potters who haven’t made anything, and both women become disillusioned by the empty promise of an artistic career. This is an experimental novel which works around reconstructing gaps; in the words of Julietta Singh, Nicola’s desire to complete Donna’s story is the wish to find the ‘ghost archive’ – a fixation on archival ruptures which continue to haunt its reader.
It is Regel’s structuring pattern, and one that gives her narrative mileage which stretches far within the novel..