Peggy

Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and by now a legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. In a reflective mood, she looks back on her thrilling, tragic and nearly impossible journey from a sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to her place as an iconoclast and an independent woman.

This novel follows Peggy from her cloistered upbringing as the daughter of two Jewish dynasties. Her life is turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father dies on the Titanic. His death sends her searching for passion and personal freedom, and for faith in the transformative power of art.

The story takes her through the glamorous but sexist and anti-Semitic art worlds of New York and Europe. She meets many men who love her and her money while underestimating her intellect, talent and vision. She must also balance loyalty to her family against her need to escape their narrow, snobbish ways, and cope with the unexpected limits that come with a vast fortune.

Peggy is the final book by Rebecca Godfrey, author of Under the Bridge, which was adapted as a Hulu limited series starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone. Godfrey died in 2022, and her friend, the writer Leslie Jamison, completed the novel.