Join us on October 10 to celebrate the life and work of Innis alumna Rebecca Godfrey (1967-2022) and to launch her instant-bestselling novel, Peggy.
Following a reading from Peggy by award-winning Canadian actress Christine Horne, an esteemed panel will discuss Peggy Guggenheim and the ways authors and artists can excavate women’s stories through literary and historical fiction. Panelists include writers Doretta Lau and Rosemary Sullivan and AGO Associate Curator of Modern Art Adam Welch. Writer-educator Janet Somerville will moderate.
We will also hear from art historian and critic Hella Wiedmer-Newman, a former intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Town Hall, Innis College, 2 Sussex Ave
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Peggy is 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.
Copies of Peggy will be available for purchase on site.
"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."
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.
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.
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