Rebecca Godfrey’s Novel Brought to Life Posthumously by Leslie Jamison
Late Writing professor Rebecca Godfrey tragically passed away in 2022 after a long battle with cancer, leaving behind an unfinished novel about the life of art heiress and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim. With the help of friend and fellow writer, Associate Professor Leslie Jamison, Peggy has now been released by Random House.
Godfrey, celebrated for her novel The Torn Skirt and the nonfiction book Under the Bridge—which was adapted into a Hulu series earlier this year—spent the last decade of her life working on Peggy. The novel, beginning in Venice in the late 1950s, offers an imagined portrayal of Peggy Guggenheim's journey from a sheltered heiress to an independent woman and a legendary art collector.
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 the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.
Godfrey’s work on Peggy was interrupted by her diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer in 2018. Despite being given only six months to a year to live, Godfrey defied the odds, continuing to work on the novel until her passing in October 2022. Recognizing she might not complete the manuscript, Godfrey entrusted her vision to her literary agent and close friends, leaving detailed instructions on how she wanted the story to conclude.
Jamison, a close friend who developed a deep connection with Godfrey during their time at Columbia University, was approached by Godfrey’s agent and husband to finish the manuscript. She honored her friend’s wishes.
“I knew at once that I would say yes—not because I felt any particular sense of confidence but because I was fully committed to trying,” Jamison recently wrote in an essay for The New Yorker. “There are so few things we can do for the dead; this was something I could do for her. Rebecca had been clear that if she died before the novel was done she did not want it published as an incomplete manuscript. This didn’t surprise me, but other questions remained: How should the novel be brought to completion? How much of it, exactly, had she left behind?”
"My worst nightmare was that I was going to drive Rebecca’s voice out of the book with my own work," Jamison told the LA Times. In her essay for The New Yorker, she described the struggle she faced at the start of the writing process, noting how she felt compelled to differentiate between her own additions and Rebecca’s original work by marking them with her initials or a different font. She explained that it felt wrong to alter Rebecca's paragraphs or to let her own imagination take over, likening it to an invasive species encroaching on the ecosystem that Rebecca had carefully crafted.
Jamison eventually overcame her fears by immersing herself in historical material about Guggenheim and Godfrey’s manuscript, notes, and conversations with friends. This allowed her to maintain the integrity of Godfrey’s vision. She found the “triangle” of herself, Godfrey, and Guggenheim easier to navigate than working alone within the confines of Godfrey’s original construction. “In order to inhabit her vision, I had to leave deference behind and take a swing,” Jamison said.
The novel has already received rave reviews. Booklist described it as “a lush novel infused with torment, determination, and wit,” noting its keenly drawn characters and vivid historical context. Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, calling it “magnificent,” and praised Godfrey’s ability to capture Peggy’s constant wavering between boldness and self-doubt. Jamison herself wrote about her friend’s main character: “Peggy had often been misunderstood and disrespected, seen as a slutty dilettante who threw her money around. But Rebecca 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.”
Reflecting on the process of finishing a friend’s novel, Jamison said working on the book made her feel close to Godfrey. She recalled moments when she wanted to share a quote or anecdote from her research, only to find that Godfrey had already discovered and highlighted it. One example was a 1938 letter in which Guggenheim mentioned spending time in Paris “working hard on my gallery and f—ing."
“I thought, ‘Rebecca would have loved this line,'" Jamison said. "And she did!”
For Jamison, the hardest part was writing the final word. “I thought it would feel good to finish a full draft, but I was wrong,” she admitted in her essay. “Finishing felt worse than any other part of the process; I felt Rebecca’s absence more acutely. She deserved this moment, not me. This was what she’d worked toward for years. She wasn’t here to read what I’d written or to tell me how to make it better. I kept fiddling with passages, refusing to close the document, realizing that finishing the novel meant saying goodbye to her all over again.”
Yet in Peggy, there’s a line from one of the main characters calling art a “living thing.” Leslie Jamison agrees, saying this book is a way to keep something Rebecca made alive and with us. “There’s also a way that this book feels like a living thing insofar as Rebecca is no longer alive,” Jamison told The LA Times. “This book is not her, Peggy’s not her, but it is this thing that she made, it contains so much of her, and so it feels like it’s a part of her that’s very much still with us.”
