A new look

Rebecca Godfrey did something brave in her novel about Peggy Guggenheim.

She wrote in Peggy Guggenheim’s voice, bringing us in close to the unexpected, constraint-defying decisions that laid the groundwork for her to become the boundary-breaking entrepreneur who introduced modern art–and the artists who created it–to much of the world.

The focus of Peggy is on the first part of Guggenheim’s life, before she was married to artist Max Ernest, before she turned an unfinished Venice palazzo into a home for her magnificent collection of works by Berenice Abbott, Constantin Brancusi, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso, among many more.

Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York in 1898 to Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, who brought together the fortunes of two 19th-century Jewish dynasties. (Her uncle Solomon was the art collector who founded the Guggenheim Museum in New York.)

The novel begins when Peggy is 14 and her beloved–albeit often absent–father perishes in the sinking of the Titanic .

Guggenheim then rebels against her family’s expectations. She rarely did anything halfway and her rebellion was no exception. She went all in.

I’ve encountered biographies of Guggenheim before, and have visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, so I figured I had a decent background about her life. I understood that she battled sexism and antisemitism to make her mark in the art world. But there are other extraordinary things she did that I knew nothing about until I read this book. Here are just a few:

• While a student, she joined the Suffragists’ protests for a women’s right to vote.

• She went to typing school (hardly a usual activity for a young woman in her position), then used her new skills to clerk at a radical New York bookstore called the Sunwise Turn.

• At 21, she moved to Paris where she befriended avant-garde artists and writers, many of whom were living in poverty in Montparnasse. Among them was Laurence Vail, known as the King of Bohemia, whom she married.

• She fostered the work of writers as well as artists. In this vein, she encouraged political revolutionary Emma Goldman to write her memoirs and supported her in a cottage in the south of France while she did so.

Peggy is the last book written by Rebecca Godfrey, the award-winning author whose true-crime story Under the Bridge was adapted as a Hulu series starring Riley Keough as Godfrey. Peggy was left unfinished when Godfrey died of cancer in 2022. It was completed by the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison. In naming the novel a “most anticipated book of 2024,” Literary Hub wrote, “two minds…came together to produce this work of exploration, intrigue, and self-discovery.”

Betsy Gomberg reads (and sometimes writes about) Jewish books.