Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Persephone Classics) Review

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(More customer reviews)Winfired Watson's little 1938 fantasy has become the bestelling reissue for the terrific Persephone Books imprint in the UK, and its not hard to see why. Basically a Cinderella story set during the 30s, Watson's novel concerns a dowdy governess sent by mistake by her agency to the home of a glamorous and dithering nightclub singer, who comes to rely upon Miss Pettigrew to straighten out her love life. Miss Pettigrew not only rises to the challenge (much to her own surprise), but undergoes a makeover and finds some romance for her own life as well. While undeniably slim (and purposefully so), the novel is just about irresistible: it plays upon the same fantasy as Jane Austen's MANSFIELD PARK, the fantasy of being not only loved but also needed. Curiously, the trappings of glamour in this novel come not from the world of the wealthy and titled (as per usual in British fiction from this era, as in the novels of Waugh and Nancy Mitford) but from a world envisioned in American film: the world of night clubs, self-made men, and cocaine-dabbling gigolos.

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Now a major motion picture starring Frances McDormand (Fargo) and Amy Adams (Enchanted)!

"Why has it taken more than half a century for this wonderful flight of humor to be rediscovered?"—Guardian

"The sweetest grown-up book in the world."—Sunday Times

"Everyone, no matter how poor or prim or neglected, has a second chance to blossom in the world."—Daily Mail, in reference to Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

A major film released in 2008, Miss Pettigrew Lives for Day is a delightful, funny, lighthearted novel. First published in 1938, it was reissued in the United Kingdom in 2000, complete with thirty-five original illustrations, and has sold over 22,000 copies.

Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamour that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.

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