After Peggy's staid and stodgy mother caught her in another lie, she threatened to send her to boarding school instead of liberal Jacobi. Accusing her 16 year-old daughter of hanging out with the wrong crowd, she called her a "libertine." When Peggy sneaked into her father's study, she consulted the dictionary for the meaning, "one free from restraint. one who acts according to his impulses and desires..." She realized that the word exactly expressed what she wanted to be, and she decided to live her life as a libertine from then on. When her mother started to arrange her marriage, she moved to Paris and almost never left. She caroused with and married Laurence Vail, a trendsetter and abuser with whom she had two children. She used her massive fortune to sponsor writers and artists, and to collect modern art, focusing on surrealism. She hobnobbed with the likes of Emma Goldman and James Joyce, and had a torrid affair with Samuel Beckett. Her life was full and extremely novel worthy.
Godfrey tells the story of Peggy Guggenheim in the first person, so the reader feels like a friend and confidant to this amazing woman. The novel only covered her life through World War II but you know that if it began like that, there would be so much more to look forward to...like her marriage to Max Ernst, and her vast additions to the collection in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Peggy is the novel that no lover of art should miss.
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