The title of Hannah Regel’s assured debut novel presumably alludes to Angela Carter’s description of the potter Michael Cardew as “the last sane man in a crazy world”. Two of Regel’s three female characters are aspiring ceramicists. Neither achieve Cardew’s fame. The Last Sane Woman is a study in artistic endeavour, disappointment and envy.
Nicola has a bachelor’s degree in sculpture and dreams of becoming a successful artist. Instead, she works as a nursery nurse, “posting photographs of the objects she’d made to the internet with the same fervour as she posted her face”. When she discovers the Feminist Assembly, “a small, underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art”, she becomes obsessed with the letters that ceramicist Donna Dreeman wrote to her best friend, Susan Baddeley, in the 1970s and 80s, before she took her own life (Susan’s is the third perspective).
