Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman begins with protagonist Nicola Long arriving at the Feminist Assembly archive in London in hopes of something. At first, she tells the archivist, an older woman untidy and falling apart like the archive itself, that she wants «to read about women who can’t make things». The archivist is confused, as is Nicola. We soon find out that the real object of her search is a dead woman.

The seeker of dead women is a figure I am all too familiar with, as I myself fall into that category and have marveled over the years at the accumulation of fiction and biographical autocriticism in which she appears again and again. As a researcher writing a novel about my search for the philosopher and experimental novelist Susan Taubes, I have rather warily taken note of the wave of books that seem to document my own urges. Born Judit Zsuzsánna Feldmann in Budapest in 1928, Taubes immigrated with her father to the US in 1939. In her 1969 novel Divorcing, an already-dead protagonist named Sophie retells surreal shards of Taubes’ life as a scholar, writer, and woman estranged from Judaism who wanders the cities of Budapest, New York, and Paris, as well as the bottom of the ocean, alongside foils for her real-life kids, ex-husband, and friends. When Divorcing was reedited in the NYRB classics series a couple of years ago, almost all the reviews pointed to Taubes’ suicide right after the novel’s initial publication (and that it was Susan Sontag, her best friend, who identified the body). In the figure of Susan Taubes, the seeker of dead women finds a ripe mix of estrangement, undiscovered talent, and fatal glamour.

Like Nicola in The Last Sane Woman, the seeker herself is usually female, often white, floundering, and in search of something that may redeem or remake her. She descends into the archive in hopes of unearthing some element of her own salvation, which comes in the form of an often mysterious, frequently misunderstood, and invariably dead woman. Nicola works at a childcare center in the mornings and struggles to make ceramics in late afternoons. She’s trapped in a cycle of bad jobs, a hollow relationship, empty conversations with her mom, a loss of desire to make art, and vapid encounters with Instagram-hungry ceramicists bumping cocaine in the bathroom. The woman she’s researching is a ceramicist from the late seventies and eighties named Donna Dreeman, about whom she only knows two things: she committed suicide at thirty-three, and wrote numerous letters to a woman named Susan.

Susan and Donna are best friends and seeming opposites. Donna, the ceramicist, is a bohemian creative, forever in trouble, filled with self-doubt and mired in romantic affairs as she bounces from one job and apartment to the next. Susan is the steady childhood friend who remained in the small English hometown where they grew up, works at a bank, and has a husband and child. The letters document Donna’s struggles to make art, find friends, and gain recognition. She’s working against the tide, doesn’t know the right people, lacks the charisma to charm everyone. Nicola is thrilled by Donna’s letters, but neither her cardboard boyfriend nor her distracted millennial friends want to hear about it. In an early scene in the novel, she marvels at Donna’s writing: «Particles of dust raged pointlessly in front of her. The word ‹tizzy› jangling around inside her head. This was exactly how she felt. The thrill pulled a thread across her chest; Nicola wasn’t just overhearing, she was being overheard!» The seeker pursues the identification with her object above all else, because both she and the dead women have special and overlooked talents.