For friends of Rebecca Godfrey, the writer's final novel is more than a posthumous stamp on a career cut short — it's another piece of her to savour now that she's gone. Stephanie Savage was among those with a front-row seat to Godfrey's tireless work on "Peggy" during what turned out to be the final decade of her life. When it became clear Godfrey wouldn't be able to finish the book about the heiress Peggy Guggenheim before her death, Godfrey left extensive notes so someone else could.
"'Peggy' coming out after she's gone has been a really beautiful gift to those of us who loved her," said Savage, whose decades-long friendship with Godfrey began at the University of Toronto's Innis College. "There's a real exuberance and a zest for life and inquisitiveness and a purposefulness in Peggy's story that is also very much Rebecca's story of leaning in." The book, published by Knopf Canada on Tuesday, tells a fictionalized version of Guggenheim's whirlwind life story, of falling in love with men and art and the act of living.
It charts the first half of her life from her father's death on the Titanic in 1912 through to the late 1930s as she prepared to open a gallery in London. When Godfrey died of cancer in 2022 at age 54, her literary agent asked her friend Leslie Jamison to complete her 300-page manuscript using notes Godfrey left behind, including some she dictated to her husband and friends in her final days. "The process of working on this book was unlike any creative task .