The Libertine

In Rebecca Godfrey’s careful prose, the prominent art collector Peggy Guggenheim becomes much more than an heiress or a silly dilettante — both caricatures that Godfrey wanted to correct. Instead, the great benefactor of modernist and surrealist art is depicted as an early feminist. Awed by the suffragettes as a teenager, she later sneaks away from her family’s dynasty to forge her own path in Paris. Her preferred moniker? “Libertine.” As a young girl, she looks up the word when her mother uses it to insult a school friend: “One free from restraint; one who acts according to his impulses and desires; a defamatory name for a freethinker.” Peggy finds the definition “stark and profound,” looking at it “as twins must look at one another, knowing, known.”

Peggy begins with the young, bored libertine at home in New York. Her father’s death on the Titanic has forever altered her family life. She begs her mother to let her attend the all‑girls Jacobi...