Peggy
A Novel
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3.8 • 9 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
CBC's Best Canadian Fiction of 2024 • The Winnipeg Free Press' Best Books of 2024 • A dazzling, richly imagined novel about Peggy Guggenheim—a story of art, family, love, and becoming oneself, by the award-winning author of Under the Bridge.
"Brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times." —Jenny Offill
“Magnificent . . . Readers will be won over by Godfrey’s incandescent portrait of a singular woman.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She's in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman.
Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic. His death prompts Peggy to seek a life of passion and personal freedom, and, above all, to believe in the transformative power of art. We follow Peggy as she makes her way through the glamorous but sexist and anti-Semitic art worlds of New York and Europe and meet the numerous men who love her (and her money) while underestimating her intellect, talent, and vision. Along the way, Peggy must balance her loyalty to her family with her need to break free from their narrow, snobbish ways and from the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.
In a tour de force of imagination and insight, Rebecca Godfrey's final book—completed by her friend, the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, following Godfrey's death in 2022—brings to life the woman who helped make the Guggenheim name synonymous with art and genius.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This magnificent posthumous novel from Godfrey (Under the Bridge), completed after her death in 2022 by Jamison, concerns the life of heiress and arts patron Peggy Guggenheim. Following her father's death on the Titanic (a loss compounded by the embarrassing public knowledge that he was accompanied on the voyage by his mistress), Peggy grows increasingly interested in modern art, a passion she shared with her father. She escapes the confines of New York society for Paris in 1920, an invitation from artist Laurence Vail having "put a face on my hope" for a new life. Godfrey covers Peggy's notable acquisitions and rescue of important modern artworks on the eve of Nazi occupation, and she peppers in appearances from dozens of Peggy's real-life friends, lovers, and colleagues, including Man Ray, Djuna Barnes, and Emma Goldman. The heart of the novel, though, lies in Godfrey's depiction of her subject's evolving mindset. In lively first-person narration, Godfrey captures Peggy's constant wavering between boldness and self-doubt, between the pull of conventional motherhood and the longing to be free. Looking back on her life at 60, Peggy proudly claims her role in art history: "I could see the start of a new world.... I didn't make that world. But I helped it survive." Readers will be won over by Godfrey's incandescent portrait of a singular woman.
