The Last Sane Woman

(Paperback)

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Description

I want to read about women who can't make things.' 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 dread: what if she doesn't like what the letters lead to

Reviews

Disquieting and gorgeous, The Last Sane Woman plucks images from the world with the claustrophobic pleasure of picking a scab. It reaches deep into the negative spaces of failure and precarity, and from these resources assembles something caustic, elegant, elusive and foreboding. It's also funny, with an offbeat, sly lightness that comes from knowing exactly how high the odds are stacked against you. I was hooked by the conversation between Regel's protagonists, looping across generations to give voice to the pains of making and the shameful pleasures of destruction. -- Daisy LaFarge, author of Life without Air and Paul
The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one's own life. Regel's prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page. -- Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

Author Bio

Hannah Regel was born in Nottingham and now lives in London. From 2012-2019 she was the co-editor of the feminist art journal SALT. Hannah has two published collections of poetry, When I Was Alive and Oliver Reed (both Montez Press, 2017 and 2020).