Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamieson

From mentions in major publications to impressive stacks in local and national bookstores, Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is everywhere — and with good reason. An ode to the famed American art collector, Peggy revisits the often mistold and misremembered life of its titular character Peggy Guggenheim, resurrecting her, as Jenny Offill declares in her blurb, “as a feminist icon for our times.” 

An impressive three-part, 300-plus page novel, Peggy is the product of a decade of careful research and writing. As the extensive — and very welcome — end matter of the text explains, Godfrey was on the precipice of finishing her longtime book project when she passed away in October of last year. Refusing to shelve the unfinished book or have it published as an incomplete manuscript, Godfrey left careful instructions for completing it, tasking her friend and fellow writer Leslie Jamieson with seeing out her vision for Guggenheim’s legacy, and her own. 

The novel’s dual authorship generated a lot of interest, especially after Jamieson herself wrote about the process in her candid essay for The New Yorker. But for all the warranted attention the book has received, it seems to me that the literary feat Godfrey and Jamieson accomplished still merits a closer look. 

Mirroring both the autobiography and the historical novel through its structure and form, Peggy’s chapters are punctuated by years, allowing the novel to simultaneously broach and smooth over large swathes of time in Guggenheim’s life. Although its attention to her childhood may seem unnecessary at first, Godfrey uses these early chapters to provide insight into Guggenheim’s lifelong love of art and to contextualize her crucial relationship with her father, the American businessman Benjamin Guggenheim. In Godfrey’s portrait of her early years, Peggy is as precocious as she is endearing, regaling her father and his friends with sharp critiques and in-depth histories of major works of art. 

But when Benjamin Guggenheim’s death aboard the Titanic in 1912 coincides with Peggy’s coming-of-age, she not only loses her father but loses her ally against the harsh, male-centric world she is increasingly forced to navigate. Amid the raging gossip surrounding her father and his death, Peggy grows defensive and resentful of the men in her family and of the patriarchal system that rejects her input the moment she comes of age. 

It’s hardly surprising that, a few years later, when she encounters a group of Suffragettes marching the streets, she recognizes them as kindred spirits. Feeding off the energy of her peers and foremothers as she marches alongside them in support of women’s right to vote, the narrator’s life, as Godfrey sees it, is reframed. “Right then, in 1915,” she explains, “I vowed revenge. Not in an abstract way, not in a symbolic way. I understood that I must one day show these men that they were wrong about me, wrong about my father.” From this moment on, Guggenheim’s sense of her own vindication, her own success, is synonymous with her father’s legacy. Indeed, her march with the Suffragettes has a clarifying power, ushering her towards a fiercely free young adulthood in which she moves to Paris, finds work in a local bookstore, and all around seizes her newfound independence as a young woman of means in the pre-war era. 

Of course, the current of impending modernity that energizes Peggy in 1915 does not ensure such swift and complete emancipation for women writ large. When she marries Laurence Vail in 1922, Godfrey demonstrates how quickly the enduring trappings of heteronormative marriage ensnare Guggenheim in a reductive role. By 1927, almost halfway through her deeply turbulent marriage yet ever committed to her love of art, Peggy dreams of opening a “little shop” to “sell the art of her friends,” imagining a vocation that would make her happy, that would fill her with purpose. “But I didn’t ask,” she confides in the reader, “because I feared [Laurence’s] answer. That he would dismiss the idea as silly, or else embrace it so quickly it would seem an indictment, somehow, of my character.” Scenes like these — of which there are many — demonstrate how Guggenheim’s marriage to Vail returns her to the stifling patriarchal order she once fled, seemingly pulling her further and further away from her ability to vindicate the Guggenheim name. 

even as it traverses decades of life and personal and political histories, Peggy remains cleverly paced, inviting attentive readers to notice the circularity of the text

Ultimately, the novel contends that it is the radical, resistant women Guggenheim meets throughout the years that lead her toward the life she vowed to live. In its third and most thrilling act, Peggy showcases a nearly 40-year-old Guggenheim as she and her seemingly fearless friend Wyn Henderson open the Guggenheim Jeune, the deeply successful Parisian art gallery whose collection is still largely housed in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice today. “When people heard the word Guggenheim,” the narrator insists, “I didn’t want them to think of my father’s drowning. I wanted them to think of vicious colours and strange beauty, of how I wrecked everything that was proper and timid – in myself, and in this city.” In giving the gallery her name, that is precisely what she accomplishes. And so, even as it traverses decades of life and personal and political histories, Peggy remains cleverly paced, inviting attentive readers to notice the circularity of the text; the way it starts with Guggenheim’s vow to her father’s legacy and ends with her ultimate success through the Guggenheim Jeune. Although it shows her life moving sequentially forward, describing her marriage, her children, and even her later-in-life love affair with the famed writer Samuel Beckett, the novel also inches back toward Peggy’s foundational vow, slowly, painfully, and with much trial and error, returning her to the confident young girl who marched the streets with her foremothers and strolled the halls of galleries with her father. In the end, Peggy’s firmly feminist, avant-garde-ist, and all around triumphant portrait of Guggenheim is as much a testament to Guggenheim’s legacy as it is to Godfrey’s and Jamieson’s own.

Rebecca Godfrey (1967-2022) was an award-winning novelist and journalist. Her books include The Torn Skirt, finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the award-winning true crime story Under the Bridge, a Disney+ limited series starring Riley Keough as Rebecca Godfrey. Godfrey earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and taught writing at Columbia University. Born and raised in Canada, she lived with her husband and daughter in Upstate New York.

Publisher: Knopf Canada (August 13, 2024)
Hardcover 9″ x 6″ | 384 pages
ISBN: 9780345808332

Catherine Marcotte is an avid reader, writer, and editor. She is pursuing her MA in English Literature and Language at Queen’s University where she is writing about intersectional feminism and ecocriticism while interrogating the boundaries between personal and academic writing.