Peggy: A Novel

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.