Review: Peggy: A Novel by Rebecca Godfrey and Leslie Jamison

Peggy: A Novel by Rebecca Godfrey 

and Leslie Jamison

Blurb from Goodreads:

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 goes down with 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 antisemitic 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.  Throughout, Peggy must balance her loyalty to her family with her need to break free from their narrow, snobbish way of life and the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.

With intellect and style, Rebecca Godfrey, in her final book–completed by her friend, the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison–brings to life a woman who helped make the Guggenheim name synonymous with art and genius, recasting her as, in the words of novelist Jenny Offill, "a feminist icon for our times."

My Review:

This was good although it took me a long time to finish it.  It was fascinating and it was written in such a way that you felt like you were there.  Even if you know nothing about Peggy Guggenheim, you will enjoy this.  It is hard to imagine such a life except while reading this book.

Peggy comes out next week on August 13, 2024, and you can purchase HERE!  

I AM THE DAUGHTER OF TWO DYNASTIES; I am believed to have more money than anyone in this city, second only to our neighbor, Rockefeller. Both my grandfathers were born in stables, like Jesus, and both came to America in steerage, running from Bavaria and Switzerland. These are not fables.  These are not myths of the American Dream. The facts: both were fourteen, dark-haired boys, mute at first, then stumbling with the consonants of English; Joseph and Meyer, these were my grandfathers, and both men were peddlers, peasants, despised. In the Midwest, they knew neither cowboy nor coal miner. They sold shoehorns, spectacles, shoelaces, glue, cigars. If they got word two hens were sick in a village, they walked twenty miles to this village and sold off their own two hens. Soon Meyer invented a kind of stove polish; soon he was selling uniforms to the US Army. Then it was mines, amassing one, a hundred, all the silver mines in Alaska and Chile, all the copper mines in Mexico. Joseph learned math, stocks, and began his own bank. President Grant wished him to run the Department of Treasury. (He said no; he was too shy). By the time I was born, in 1898, Manhattan was hurtling toward a kind of European regality, and my grandfathers were no longer peasants but kings, driven toward the gilded palaces all along Fifth Avenue.