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

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.

REBECCA GODFREY was an award-winning novelist and journalist. Her first novel, The Torn Skirt, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Under the Bridge received one of Canada's largest literary awards, the British Columbia Award for Canadian Nonfiction, as well as the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing. She held an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and received fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. She taught writing at Columbia University, and lived with her family in upstate New York. She died in 2022.

Rebecca Godfrey's profile page

Leslie Jamison's profile page

“An affecting rendition of Guggenheim’s life.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Peggy had often been misunderstood and disrespected, seen as a slutty dilettante who threw her money around. But Rebecca [Godfrey] took Peggy seriously, as a woman full of wit, savvy, and passion, hungry for experience and purpose and with an eye for art, and for people, that others couldn’t yet appreciate.” —Leslie Jamison, in The New Yorker

“A beautifully imagined and superbly written novel about the tenuous line between life and art. Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.” —Jenny Offill

“A tremendous work of the imagination . . . Peggy Guggenheim embodied the twentieth century, but attempts to capture her vitality and uniqueness have tended to fall flat. No more! Rebecca Godfrey’s prose is as stylish as her protagonist and every bit as deep, sensuous, and thoughtful. . . . An unparalleled life presented as a page-turner.” —Gary Shteyngart
“[Peggy is] a devoted, creative version of the life, often in romantic thrall to the mercurial, impulsive, insulated figure at its center. . . . A vivid, indulgent imagining of the legendary collector.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Empathetic . . . Peggy follows the titular late heiress from the ages of 14 to 60 as she discovers her love of fine art, finds her place in a sexist and anti-Semitic world, and makes a name for herself.”—Time
“A fascinating portrait . . . [Godfrey's] friend Leslie Jamison wrote the final part, and has done a wonderful job of keeping the tone and flavour of the original going until the end.”—The Sunday Times
“Godfrey does full justice to the rich eccentricity of the story but, more important, she does justice to Peggy herself by giving her a voice—one that is intimate, urgent, imagistic.”—Financial Times
“Richly drawn . . . Peggy is a rich—in all senses—and rewarding summer read.”—Telegraph
“Peggy, a fictionalization of heiress and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim’s life, is Godfrey’s third and final book, which she wrote during the final decade of her life.”—Los Angeles Times
“Magnificent . . . Readers will be won over by Godfrey’s incandescent portrait of a singular woman.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A lush novel infused with torment, determination, and wit. With keenly drawn characters based on real-life figures and a vivid and illuminating historical context, Peggy . . . is enthralling, revealing, and resonant.”—Booklist
“The novel follows Guggenheim’s whirlwind life through the art worlds of America and Europe, and the interesting, high-brow, and often sexist circles she traveled in.”—W magazine
“A celebration of love . . . her prose on those pages that she pored over the longest positively gleams with an electric brio.”—The Boston Globe
“An exhilarating and absorbing portrait of a fascinating woman.”—Grazia
“A smart, exciting, and big-hearted book that not only thinks about what a life can be but also how it becomes legendary.”—Town & Country