Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day was a late addition to my #20booksofsummer reading list, filling in a gap I had deliberately left blank so I could include titles selected by the book club.
Winifred Watson’s 1938 novel is a sweet tale about a governess in straitened circumstances whose life is turned around as the result of a mistake. She arrives at the job agency one morning, desperately hoping they can find her a new position. Without it she’ll be kicked out of her flat and become destitute.
She’s despatched to meet a Miss La Fosse, supposedly to be interviewed as a nursery governess. But the agency has muddled up the positions and Miss La Fosse turns out to be a glamorous nightclub singer with a very complicated love life. As a result of this mix up, Miss Pettigrew is thrown into the kind of glamorous world she’s only heard of hitherto or glimpsed in the cinema and the day and night she spends with Delysia LaFosse transforms her outlook on life and her future.
Delysia LaFosse is a magnificent creation, a young woman who drifts about her apartment in a diaphanous negligee late into the morning and has no reservations about stripping off in front of a stranger. Guinevere is taken aback by the scenes she encounters in her prospective employer’s flat but it’s all very exciting. Men come and go; there’s a lot of kissing and changing of frocks and strong drinks before noon.
She was past remonstrance now, past bewilderment, surprise, expostulation. Her spirits soared. Everything was happening too quickly. She couldn’t keep up with things, but by golly she could enjoy them.
Before the day is out Miss Pettigrew has encountered a whirl of new experiences — cocktails, a night club; new clothes and hairdo and her first kiss.
She’s also found her voice. The down-at-heel mouse of a woman who knocks on Delysia LaFosse’s door is transformed into a woman whose wise counsel on love and marriage is cherished by her new found friends.
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is a wonderfully comic tale with a rags-to-riches feel good story at its heart. The narrative is considerably over-the-the- top (lots of exclamatory language) but it all works. It’s impossible not to be drawn into Miss Pettigrew’s world and relish in her transformation and her change in fortune
Miss Pettigrew stared. She caught the back of a chair for support. She felt faint. Another woman stood there. A woman of fashion: poised, sophisticated, finished, fastidiously elegant. A woman of no age. Obviously not young. Obviously not old. Who would care about age? No one. Not in a woman of that charming exterior. The rich black velvet of the gown was of so deep and lustrous a sheen it glowed like colour. An artist created it. It had the wicked brilliant cut that made its wearer look both daring and chaste.
This was the perfect novel to help lift me out of my recent reading slump.
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