Revisionist Histories: On Hannah Regel’s “The Last Sane Woman”
Hannah Regel | The Last Sane Woman | Verso | July 2024 |227 Pages
In an interview with Montez Press, Hannah Regel recommends Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina. Published two years before Bachmann’s death in 1971, Malina was to be the first entry in her Todesarten cycle, meaning “Death Styles.” Set in post-war Austria, the book’s narrator is driven to madness by two men and the memory of war: the middle section of the book is nightmares of abusive fathers and scenes of torture. Meanwhile, she fails to keep up with her correspondence. When the narrator sits at her typewriter, she instead composes fantasies about a princess riding a horse along the Danube who happens upon a mysterious, kind man. Near the end of the novel, weak and confused, she drafts letters to her lawyer regarding the creation of her will, which she signs from “an unknown woman.” In Regel’s first novel, The Last Sane Novel, she seems to have taken up Bachmann’s figure of an “unknown woman” tortured by the social and political world of Europe after the Second World War. But in her story, instead of a single unknown woman, there are three, each contending with the ramifications of Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom.
The Last Sane Woman begins in the present day with Nicola Long, a ceramicist without a kiln. Her pots live under her bed and she posts them to Instagram when she feels needy. She lives in London, dates a man who appreciates Mies van der Rohe and his dog more than her, and works at a primary school, a job she took to give her time in the afternoons to practice the craft she has given up. From a bus window, heading home from a doctor’s clinic in Waterloo where she took two pills to induce an abortion, she spots posters for the Feminist Assembly, an archive for women artists. The Assembly, housed in a rundown building in Southwark, is “tragically unfashionable,” and what remains are screen-printed posters taped to crumbling drywall. There, she informs the archivist Marcella Goodwoman (née Goodman) that she “wants to learn about women who can’t make things”—that is, she wants to learn about herself. On her first day at the archive, Marcella unearths a box stuffed with letters from an undiscovered ceramicist, Donna Dreeman, to her childhood friend, Susan Baddeley, between 1976 and 1988. Donna killed herself, Marcella learns, and Susan donated Donna’s letters to the archive after her death.
From here, each chapter alternates narrators, following the trio in a close third-person narration. Donna’s letters are the fulcrum on which the novel vertiginously turns from Nicola in the present, to Donna in the past, to Susan in the present and past. A letter put down in Susan’s kitchen in the eighties is picked up by Nicola in her carrel in the present. When Susan presses a thumb, greasy with custard, onto the pages of a letter, Nicola speculates on the stain’s provenance.
The Last Sane Woman is an epistolary novel, to be sure, but also a poet’s. Regel has published two poetry collections, Oliver Reed (2020) and When I Was Alive (2017), both with Montez Press. Her poetic voice occasionally emerges, but the novel’s structure is more formally conservative than Malina, another poet’s novel, for example, giving greater weight to time and place and plot. However, the correspondence in The Last Sane Woman gives Regel permission to distance herself from the exigencies of the novel as a form. In Donna’s dispatches, the novel finds its poetry, which is candid and philosophical, earnest and snarky.
From the first letter, Nicola takes pleasure in Donna’s words. She copies sentences from Donna’s letters into her notes that she resonates with, like “I wonder if I shouldn’t just give it all up.” Over time, Nicola develops a dangerous case of literary identification, collecting the similarities between her and Donna’s lives—their shared hometown and artistic medium, disdain for the art world, bad boyfriends, boots breaking at the seams—as “evidence that something very rare was happening to her, as only happened to people in books and films.” Nicola breaks up with her boyfriend and quits her job at the primary school for a tutoring gig with flexible hours, allowing her to spend more time with Donna’s letters. As a tutor, she advises a waifish teenager on her arts and design GCSE, who prophetically spits at Nicola, “Nostalgia’s a disease.” On the fridge in the teenager’s kitchen, Nicola notices a magnet with a photograph of an aging woman emerging from a body of water paired with the text, “Growing old is not for sissies.”
The teenager’s words jangle in Nicola’s mind, but she sees the letters as more than a nostalgia-fueled hobby. They become her raison d’être. Nicola pictures herself curating an exhibit about Donna, pairing her pots alongside her letters. This, she imagines, will introduce her to the art world, bringing government grants and invitations to Women in Ceramics fêtes, requests to contribute to monographs, and offers to speak on panels about crafting revisionist histories of art. Her success, she wagers, will bring both her and Donna meaning. But this plan hinges on finding Susan, Donna’s oldest friend, and asking her permission to exhibit the letters.
Susan bristles at Nicola’s request. Why would Nicola have the right to publicly exhibit her friend’s letters, in effect reviving her for a public that never embraced her while she was alive? And who is Nicola to think she can understand Donna when she, her oldest friend, failed? “How easy it was to read something wrong,” Susan thinks, sipping a gin and tonic and puffing on a cigarette in her back garden. Donna’s letters were not evidence of an unknown genius brimming with productive chaos, Susan knows, but of a woman slipping into oblivion. In her youth, Susan adored Thomas Hardy’s tragedies, but she failed to read Donna as a Tess d’Urbervilles or Sue Bridehead, the tragic, central figure. If only she had been a better reader, Susan speculates, less consumed by her own unhappiness, Donna would be alive. She correctly predicts Nicola’s lack of insight: Nicola’s fixation with Donna is a fixation with herself, clouding any perception into the other woman’s inner world.
While Susan worked at a bank and started a family, Donna chased after men and recognition from the art world. But clay, Donna writes in a letter to Susan, gives her a grip on reality: “There is the world of clay, where everything is ruled by fire and force and where the images in my head get pushed out through my fists into something real.” The act of firing in ceramics also instills an optimism in Donna. “To be a potter without believing that the future has a sense of goodwill towards you would be impossible,” she tells Susan. But near the end of her life, still unknown, her relationship with clay perverts. In her late twenties, Donna is too old to pretend her lifestyle is boho-chic or just a phase. She shapes her clay into thin rods, liable to shatter in extreme heat and lacking any functionality as objects. If her early-career pots sit neatly like “the soft hole in a baby’s head,” the later work winds threateningly like a coiled viper, poised to attack. In a letter, Donna describes her work as “not even pots anymore but innervated beings,” as if infusing her remaining vitality into her ceramics. Donna’s art is no longer useful because she believes herself to be no longer useful. Ironically, this likely makes her work more interesting, but this is negligible. Neither a successful artist like her peers nor an abiding homemaker like Susan, she falls outside of legibility. She only becomes useful four decades later, when another young woman, similarly adrift, happens upon her and thinks she can interpret her story for her own means.
In revisionist feminist art and literary histories, a premium is placed on the young, suicidal woman. This spring, Gagosian exhibited Francesca Woodman’s photography. In her black-and-white self-portraits on gelatin silver-print, Woodman captures herself in an empty room, nude and prostrate on concrete or swirling in a tangle of fabric and limbs. Woodman, who killed herself at twenty-two, has, as Johanna Fateman characterized her in a review of Woodman’s work at the Marian Goodman Gallery in 2021, become “a tragic genius in feminine form.” Last July, New York Review Books published Susan Taubes’ novella, Lament for Julia. After the publication of her first novel Divorcing, she killed herself at the age of forty-one. Reviews contextualized her as the next dead woman you need to know—part of Susan Sontag’s milieu, overshadowed in life by her philosopher-king husband. The Last Sane Woman, which makes Donna an amalgam of Woodman and Taubes, among others, criticizes this trend. Posthumous recognition of work from dead women, preferably young, crystallized before aging, is everywhere. It is an enticing idea: sift through extant material and pluck out a woman, prime for reconsideration. But the triangulated structure of The Last Sane Woman frames the contemporary reappraisal of the forgotten, feminine, and suicidal young artist as nostalgic at best and parasitic at worst, begging the question: Is this a useful political project? Is this even a useful personal project?
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Regel studied Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, earned an MFA in Sculpture at Slade School of Art, and co-edited the feminist art journal SALT from 2012 to 2019. She has spoken of the sneaky exclusion of women artists at Goldsmiths: “Anything that was slightly more slippery, or god forbid personal, just didn’t really have a place,” she said. “I remember being told that my work would be better if I looked at more male artists.” It is dismaying to hear this sentiment so long after the feminist art interventions of the ’70s. The Last Sane Woman is her latest installment in a career-long engagement, across poetry, editorial work, and now fiction, in interrogating the contemporary conditions of being a woman and an artist, all while trying to make ends meet in a city with a cost of living crisis. Regel’s oeuvre has, in some ways, been a sustained engagement with and criticism of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
The importance of a room, and the impossibility of making rent, appears in each of her books. Donna depends on friends, boyfriends, and employers for housing. A poem in When I Was Alive is titled “How to Rent a Flat in London.” In Oliver Reed, Regel writes, “I am too expensive for my life, psychic life / moving cooly from room to room / in what is always / someone else’s house.” As in this poem, Donna goes from room to room, perennially transient, while visiting posh boyfriends at their country homes. The gesture towards the material condition appears in Regel’s depiction of making art, too. It is not spontaneous genius, but disciplined work, and Regel knowingly describes this labor: the kneading of clay, the slathering of ceramic mortar, the twisting of wires. There is a labor to the artistic process like there is a labor to the moments of poetic ecstasy in the novel like there is a labor to the sex Susan is having with her new boyfriend like there is a labor, albeit hackneyed, involved in bringing forgotten women into history. Regel criticizes the type of labor often required to make rent—labor which alienates one from oneself—but extols the labor involved in art, in making a beautiful object.
But seeking beauty has its trappings, a fact that the girls and women across Regel’s books confront. I noticed a pervading belief that a pair of shoes will make everything right. Oliver Reed begins, “The feet of adult women make impressions in corridors / Little girls want shoes that go clack.” Early in The Last Sane Woman, Donna purchases a pair of red Gibson clogs for her graduate exhibition show after picturing her drab boots beside the pointed heels of her classmate Rose, a chic glass-blower. In commune with “all the women searching for shoes in the rain,” Donna scrounges up some cash and trots off, clogs in hand, only to promptly drop them in a puddle.
Two years ago, I charged a pair of vintage Miu Miu flats to my credit card. After a few months, I was notified of the package’s arrival at the post office on Calle Carrera de San Francisco. The parcel came from London, outside the European Union, the postal worker said, and there was a cash tariff to be paid. At the Santander up the road, I called a friend to Bizum me ten euros, promising to buy her drinks later on, and I marched back to the post office where I forked over the red bill in exchange for my slippers, which I wore the rest of the day, even as the navy blue patent leather pushed into the skin on my heels, creating what I described to my friend later as “gashes,” making it so I could hardly walk. I thought of Mavis Gallant: “The sound of Madrid is a million trampling feet,” and when I made it home, I hid the blood-stained shoes under the bed. Donna and I were both warned of the fallacy implicit in a commitment to beauty: the pleasure of purchase is temporary and the fantasy is easily ruptured.
Nicola also bleeds from to a pair of flats near the novel’s end. Walking to the train station, her gash grows and blood sets into the leather. With Susan’s refusal in Nicola’s inbox, her plan to place Donna into art history seems futile. As the train leaves the station, she spots an elderly woman sprinting down the platform. She is not unlike Benjamin’s angel of history, but she’s wearing a swimming costume. The angelus novus whips herself with a sunflower and her costume drops, falling into the past, littering the platform. And she’ll never be able to catch Nicola, a young woman, injured by a pretty pair of shoes. She has been whisked away on a train, witnessing the past while heading toward something else. It is a dream-image and a warning. Perhaps it is best to refuse myth-making and to let some women, their art and their pain, be unknown.