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 now a Hulu limited series
starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone “Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde
adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.”—Jenny Offill author of Dept. of
Speculation “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 the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.
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.
