Peggy Audiobook By Rebecca Godfrey, Leslie Jamison cover art

Peggy

A Novel

Preview

Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Peggy

By: Rebecca Godfrey, Leslie Jamison
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $23.40

Buy for $23.40

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

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

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 from the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.

In a tour de force of imagination and insight, 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.

©2024 Rebecca Godfrey and Leslie Jamison (P)2024 Knopf Canada
Biographical Fiction New York
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

“Peggy had often been misunderstood and disrespected, seen as a slutty dilettante who threw her money around. But Rebecca [Godfrey] took Peggy seriously, as a woman full of wit, savvy, and passion, hungry for experience and purpose and with an eye for art, and for people, that others couldn’t yet appreciate.” —Leslie Jamison, in The New Yorker

“A beautifully imagined and superbly written novel about the tenuous line between life and art. Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.” —Jenny Offill

“A tremendous work of the imagination . . . Peggy Guggenheim embodied the twentieth century, but attempts to capture her vitality and uniqueness have tended to fall flat. No more! Rebecca Godfrey’s prose is as stylish as her protagonist and every bit as deep, sensuous, and thoughtful. . . . An unparalleled life presented as a page-turner.” —Gary Shteyngart

What listeners say about Peggy

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.