Next month’s Forum will be about Persephone Book No. 23: Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books
I began to write about Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day with some trepidation. I love it, who couldn’t love it? But I wanted to work out why it has lasted so well, why the ‘feel-good’ factor, which made it so popular in 1938, remains undimmed seventy years later. I was afraid that any attempt to analyse it would be like trying to deconstruct a soufflé.
Clarice Cliff: Age of Jazz. 1930. These figures may have been placed around the wireless during broadcasts of dance music.
There is nothing original in comparing Miss Pettigrew with Cinderella. One blogger describes Miss Pettigrew as a combination of Cinderella and Mary Poppins. I am inclined to agree. Thanks to a chance encounter with the exotically named Delysia LaFosse, Guinevere Pettigrew goes from rags to riches in twenty-four hours, while handing out no-nonsense advice along the way. The down-trodden, virtuous, ladylike Miss Pettigrew meets, Miss LaFosse, who is none of those things.
Twenty years, at most, divide the two, but they have grown up in different worlds. We glimpsed these worlds, and we met these women in last month’s Forum book, A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam. Miss Pettigrew was already a ‘superfluous woman’ when she was born, perhaps around the turn of the century. By 1911 women outnumbered men in the population by nearly 1.5million. E.M. Delafield (author of Consequences, Persephone Book No. 19) writes of her own pre-1914 girlhood that she ‘could never remember a time when she had not known that a woman’s failure or success in life depended entirely on whether or not she succeeded in getting a husband…. any husband at all was better than none.’ The tragedy of her heroine, Alex Clare, bears that out. By 1918 the statistics were far worse: 65 women to every 45 men.
If being on the shelf was bad, being poor and on the shelf was infinitely worse. A girl needed a roof over her head. If she had no husband to provide a roof, and her father lacked the means either to keep her under the family roof, or to educate her to a level at which she could pay for own roof (and very few would be able to afford that), domestic service at some level was one of the few choices open to her. Miss Pettigrew, daughter of an impoverished vicar, has had to make her way as a nursery governess, not in a large aristocratic household, for there were fewer of those by 1920, but in a series – for she is not a very good nursery governess – of small middle-class households, in which she has had to live tight up against the family, without ever being part of it, ‘living in other people’s houses and being dependent on their moods’. Deeply romantic at heart, Miss Pettigrew nevertheless readily admits to herself that she would have married any man who had asked her ’to escape the Mrs Brummegans of this world’.
Miss Delysia LaFosse has reached adulthood in the Thirties; it was not a good time economically but she does not want for suitors: the current trio, Phil and Nick and Michael, would have been at school, or in their prams, when their older cousins were dying in the trenches. Nor does she want for money. Miss LaFosse and her friends can look after themselves, and if singing or hairdressing does not bring in enough, they can rely on their looks. Respectability is no longer everything. These are latter-day flappers, who have inherited the freedoms of the nineteen twenties, even if they are back in corsets. Miss LaFosse has learnt how to live by living. Miss Pettigrew has had to learn to survive by observing the lives of others.
'A bath first', said Miss LaFosse
Ordinarily their paths would be unlikely to cross, but a fortuitous error on the part of an employment agency takes Miss Pettigrew over the threshold of 5 Onslow Mansions into a different universe. She leaves behind the rigid conventions instilled in her by her mother, recognising immediately that Miss LaFosse’s room was ‘not the kind of room my dear mother would have chosen’, but quickly sensing that it ‘was the kind of room in which one did things and strange events occurred and amazing creatures … lived vivid, exciting, hazardous lives.’ In this wonderland objects are brilliant, velvety, exotic, colourful. Nothing matches anything else (the late Mrs Pettigrew must have had views on matching) and when the door knocker sounds, it does not announce the butcher or the baker or the candlestick maker, but some new excitement, some new drama. ‘This’, thought Miss Pettigrew, ‘is Life. I have never lived before.’
Miss Pettigrew arrives at Onslow Mansions in an ugly, threadbare brown coat, thin, hungry, timid, defeated and friendless, in the forlorn hope of being taken on as a nursery governess. Miss LaFosse, golden-haired, rosy-cheeked and wearing nothing but a foamy negligee is expecting a new maid. Miss Pettigrew makes tentative efforts to explain herself, but is swept up in events, of which there is no shortage in Miss LaFosse’s rackety life. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a classic comedy of manners built on a case of mistaken identity.
The nursery governess casts her eye over the glittering room: unsuitable for children, ludicrously unsuitable, but she continues to believe, almost to the end of the novel, in the existence of her little charges. She takes the invisible, lie-a-bed lover for one of them, while he assumes that any woman wide awake and dressed at ten in the morning must have been up all night, blissfully improbable. Time and again conversations are at cross-purposes. Miss Pettigrew soon stops minding, finding that the very oddness sends ‘thrills of delight down her spine’. And at least these strange people are talking to her. ‘Through years of endurance no-one had ever really talked to her.’ In occasional asides from the bubbling fun of the day, a picture emerges of a lonely, loveless life in the houses of others.
Her new acquaintances may be somewhat louche, and have pictures on the wall that are not quite decent; they may have too much bling about them; but they are warm and inclusive. She casts off her outdated social preconceptions, and pretensions. Phil ‘was not a gentleman, yet there was something in his cheerful pleasantries that suddenly made her feel more comfortably happy and confident than all the polite, excluding courtesies that had been her measure from men all her life.’ Being a ‘lady’ has done her no good.
Working for the so-called ‘gentry’ has brought her no happiness. She could never satisfy her employers, but she has observed in them a range of behaviours on which to draw and against which to measure others. She has learnt from one that dry sherry is a safe alternative to a morning cocktail, from another that bland unawareness can defeat insults, from a third ‘she knew to a calculated nicety the demolishing effect of a negligent gesture’. Poor Miss Pettigrew, but these lessons will be put to good use in sorting out the complicated emotional affairs of her new friends.
The world into which she has stepped is not wholly unfamiliar to her. Steeped in the novels of Ethel M. Dell, she knows ‘exactly’ what Miss LaFosse is feeling when Nick (lover number 2) looks into her eyes, ‘breathlessness, terror, ecstasy; a slow melting of all her senses towards trembling surrender’. Exactly. Thanks to the talkies, ‘her lone secret vice’, ‘her weekly orgy where for over two hours she lived in an enchanted world’, she knows a good-looking man when she meets one: ‘a beautiful, cruel mouth, above which a small black moustache gave him a look of sophistication and a subtle air of degeneracy … something predatory in his expression ….’ Precisely.
Minute by minute – the chapter headings delightfully register with absurd accuracy the passing of time – Miss Pettigrew slips further into her new identity. The joy of the day lies not only in her new surroundings, but in that, being taken for someone different, she becomes a different woman. Miss LaFosse sees her as someone she can rely on, and so she proves to be. Miss Pettigrew is resourceful, practical, not easily taken in, and she is used to dealing with children. These bright young things are just big children, who need a firm hand, and a good talking-to. Delysia needs a nursery governess as much as she needs a maid. More than either, Delysia LaFosse, née Sarah Grubb, needs a mother. Miss LaFosse plays Fairy Godmother to Miss Pettigrew, she dresses her, waves her hair, brings colour to her wan face; she takes her to the ball – the night-club – and finds her a prince. Her wish is that Miss Pettigrew should be that mother, a kind, sensible, loving mother who can put her life on a straighter path than she could have cut for herself. Both women have their wishes granted.
'Absolutely straight, but the kind that takes a perfect Marcel.'
Winifred Watson, with the lightest of touches, paints the moment at which two worlds, one in which white powder is cocaine, and one in which it is a dose of Beecham’s Powders, collide, a collision from which springs humour, pathos, genuine emotion and, because this is after all a fairy tale, a positive outcome for all.
Quotes ….. do share your favourites
‘In all her lonely life Miss Pettigrew had never realised how lonely she had been … For years she had lived in other people’s houses and had never been an inmate in the sense of belonging and now, in a few short hours, she was serenely and blissfully at home. She was accepted. They talked to her.’
‘Simply and honestly she faced and confessed her abandonment of all the principles that had guided her through life. In one short day, at the first wink of temptation, she had not just fallen, but positively tumbled from grace.’
‘She could not deny that this way of sin, condemned by parents and principles, was a great deal more pleasant than the lonely path of virtue, and her morals had not withstood the test.’
‘She [Angela, Miss Pettigrew's rival for Joe's affection] had once heard that too much talking, too much laughing, too much animation, aged one. Apart from the primary consideration that she had never had anything to say, she meant to keep her looks.’
If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:
Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd (Persephone Book No:46)
Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson (Persephone Book No:53)
Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson (Persephone Book No:81)
What other bloggers have said about this book:
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was written in 1938 and is very much a product of its time, and is worth reading for that fact alone. The novel is a wonderful piece of escapism. The pace is swift and the novel races from one ridiculous situation to another. From the very first paragraph, which begins at 9:15 a.m, the reader is thrown into the action. Miss Pettigrew is compassionate and highly sympathetic, and you cannot help but warm to Delysia, who, despite being something of a ditz, is both kindhearted and generous. bfgb
As a character she’s so cleverly conflicted, between her strict and upright upbringing and the excitement and thrills of a wicked life. Her common sense is a breath of fresh air that you can’t help but fall in love with. I found myself chuckling more than once at her own wonder at finding herself in situations she’d only seen in the movies. SEEING people KISS? Shameful and almost too thrilling.
I want to hand this book to people I like, it’s so much fun. I just want them to give it back when they’re done. corinnesbookreviews
I gather that this is the most popular of all Persephone novels, whereas ‘Manja’ is not a top seller. No doubt in my mind which is the better book, but people love ‘Miss Pettigrew’ for the same reason as Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple’ – because it’s about a joyous breaking of conventions.
Of course it’s perfectly possible that the bright young things whom Guinevere meets would actually have been cold-hearted and cliquish. But, hey, this is a fairy tale!
What a good introduction and how beautifully illustrated. It places Miss Pettigrew accurately in her historical period, for one in four women born around 1900 didn’t marry because of the Great War. All this generation of spinsters are gone now – I remember a few from my childhood – but you can read about them in Virginia Nicholson’s non-fiction book, ‘Singled Out’.
I really enjoyed this book for a number of reasons. I loved the illustrations which reminded me of books that I read as a child and I wish that there were more adult books that used them! I loved the pace of the book and the tone which is lighthearted but at the same time gives you a good impression of the roles occupied by women at the time. The narrative is warm and this is a book that I return to as I find it comforting. I have always thought it would make a good play.
Imagine this tour de force novel that began over a family luncheon, on a dare that ‘I could do better’ be the top seller here, seventy years later. And the author’s only book, written just for fun. I think that’s the achievement, believing that there are women who can whip out an epochal novel, just for fun. Loved the movie too. Garnette
I really enjoyed this book – a fairytale for adults which left me with a warm, happy feeling.
This review has fired my enthusiasm to read Miss Pettigrew – thank you. (The book has been in a pile by my bed for far too long and I am really looking forward to it now.)
This is the perfect book for the ‘January blues’. How could anyone read it and not feel uplifted. OK it’s an absurd fairy story, but what’s wrong with that from time to time? It’s (almost) worth being ill – just for an excuse to re-read it. I think I’ve read it 3 times so far, given a copy to my sister and keep one handy for a friend in need of cheering. But beneath the froth, one is always aware of the hard existence in which Miss P and her like struggle to keep going – without a man to house them etc. It’s good to read Ruth Adams’ ‘A Woman’s Place’ first, perhaps, to complete the picture.
I picked up Miss Pettigrew, hoping to possibly finish it in time to post to the Forum before the end of January–and proceeded to devour it over a weekend. Not an easy task in a home with 2 small children! Add one more to the ‘favorites’ column on my Persephone bookshelf. I agree with Jill Bennett, this is definitely a perfect book for the January blues.
What a wonderful fairy tale. From the moment Miss Pettigrew walks through the door of Onslow Mansions, she mines from her years of drudgery a wealth of experiences, combined with her newfound talent for mimcry and plain speaking. I think one of the more enjoyable aspects of this tale is the notion that, should the moment arise, even the shyest and outwardly dullest of us can rise to the occasion and sparkle.
Merryn also touches on one of the more “really?” moments in the book–the fact that this group sweeps Miss P into their midst without once questioning whether she ‘belongs.’ Such questioning would utterly destroy the story. On the other hand, it is nice to think that any group, even the most cliquish, is ultimately kind at heart and would recognize the value of a human being who does not immediately appear to ‘belong’ in their set.
I’m feeling like Miss P before, down with the flu today. Your review inspires to watch it once again because of your point that the ‘group sweeps her into their midst without questions’ – beautiful.
It’s definitely a book of its time – witness the racist references to a there being a hint of the Jew about Nick, or that he’s not fit to be in the company of white women, but it’s also timeless in that we all, from time to time, need a story where the unlikeliest of women gets her man. Is it a coincidence that the fab Ciairan Hinds plays Joe, and also Captain Wentworth to Amanda Root’s Ann Elliot in a wonderful ‘Persuasion’? Now, there’s a guy I could leave home for . . . . But I also see the attraction in a story of sistership. Miss La Fosse recognises Miss Pettigrew as a woman who ‘wouldn’t let another woman down’. V. attractive.
Favourite quote: ‘Miss Pettigrew’s intelligence was quite up to the
subtle attraction of a spice of wickedness against the dullness of too much virtue.’
What I really admire most is Watson’s sheer ingenuity in managing to keep the story going. Also, loved the picture of the 1930s bathroom.
I remember purchasing this Persephone when it first appeared, sitting down and reading it straight through in two hours. I was totally and utterly enchanted by it and have read it at least once a year ever since. The black and white illustrations are perfect. I gave it to my mother to read, she was then in her early nineties and staying with me and she too read it straight through and when she closed it up said ‘what a lovely book’ and it is.
The terror and fright of Miss Pettigrew with an old age looming before her, no money, no family and nowhere to go is quite chilling and the gradual blossoming of her real character throughout the day showing the reader what kind of person she really is when all the joy has not been flattened out of her. I was absolutely on tenterhooks at the end wondering how she would find happiness and remember beaming with delight at how it concluded.
If you enjoyed this I think you might also enjoy The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett, another of my favourite Persephones. This is set in Edwardian times but the panic and fear of a future for a poor, single woman is absolutely the same. Emily Fox-Seton lives in a small bed sitting room and spends her days running errands and working for her rich society acquaintances. Well born but penniless she is in the same position as Miss P. this is a heartwarming and lovely story and, like Miss P, is one I read and re-read when ever I am swamped with review books, none of which appeal to me, and I then turn to loved and familiar works.
I agree with other bloggers that this is a wonderful antidote to winter gloom and a surfeit of Charles Dickens. The story of Cinderella is probably the most satisfying in the world, as well as the most improbable. Miss Pettigrew is an original Cinderella, being a little old for the part, but I was certain that she would find her prince by the end of her exciting day. While waiting for him to arrive I enjoyed her encounters with the younger men in the story. ‘He flung off his hat, tore off his muffler, cast gloves on the floor and glared round the room with the quenching, thrilling, piercing, paralysing eye of the traditional strong hero, but not, like him, silent.’ After this I could hardly wait to see who was going to sweep Miss Pettigrew off her feet. As a mature lady, Miss Pettigrew knows of course that looks aren’t everything and that the important thing about Joe (who is naturally ‘immaculate in evening dress’) is not that he has a ‘genial, red face’ but that he has a ‘warm, friendly smile. One contemporary acknowledged another’. I knew immediately that they were perfect for each other and would live happily ever after. It takes Miss Pettigrew about another hour to realise this but by 3.47am she is finally able to announce ‘I have a beau at last’. A perfect conclusion to a delightful book, enhanced by its original illustrations.
Like Elaine Simpson-Long I read ‘Miss Pettigrew’ straight through in a couple of hours, thoroughly enjoying the wonderful contrasts and nuances of vocabulary and juxtaposition of phrase and sentence, which expressed the fairy tale in such knowing language. Humour and subtlety paint lovely portraits of the dilettante Delysia and plain Miss Pettigrew. This book is a firm re-read favourite on my shelves.
My mother is nearly 90 but not so good at reading her own books now as Elaine Simpson-Long’s mother, so I read the book to her and she smiled and laughed all the way through. What better way of entertaining a physically frail old lady but with a book dating from the period of her own youth which is as light as a feather and lifts a person right out of the mundane limitations of her own life.
Another novelist who writes light but subtle romantic comedies in such a vein as Winifred Watson is Eva Ibbetson. Whoever likes ‘Miss Pettigrew’ will like Eva Ibbetson’s books, but she is not old enough to be considered yet by Persephone.
And I want a bathroom like Delysia’s!
This is just not a good book for winter gloom – it is great for any gloom, and regularly accompanies me to the oncologist…
I have also shared it with practically any other female I can get to sit down (must try it on my husband soon) & my mother now gives copies to friends and family she feels need a comforting lift (another one arrived this morning).
One does notice the “jew” comments & other signs of when it was written, but they are part of that time & it would spoil the romance to apply today’s morals to a fluffy little thing from between the wars. (& not to excuse it, but many “greater” works of literature from that period are much nastier)
Miss Pettigrew is a light, warm, comfort (or hot water bottle) book of the highest order. The depths of her life before this day are touched on enough to show how friendly these new people are, and although aware that this must end happily, the reader aches with fear with Miss P that she may have to go back to the grey world of her previous life. The ending – with everyone happy, not just Miss P – provides a “beau” for our heroine, but also an ideal job of housekeeper for Delysia – she is still working, so not obviously on charity, and it will undoubtedly be a help & “mothering” (as suggested above) for D LaF to have Miss P there. It would also provide Miss P with status and position in a house she can run, & be acknowledged by her new friends, rather than the half way position a governess holds.
I like the suggestion that all these bright young things need a governess (or mother) & that Miss P provides that, yet they also provide her with admiration, respect, and Joe, whose introduction by Delysia suggests that he is also involved-but-different: although a poor boy made good, the young brights are more respectful towards him, and his age makes him closer to Miss P. The Miss P that her day with Delysia brings out is one that she herself did not know she had – jettisoning the rules her parents lived by, which she had followed for so long into poverty & loneliness, realising that to be a lady is not necessarily more important than being nice to others & happy – obviously her family deemed them separate things.
This book is a romance & a fantasy, so applying reality too strongly would always lead to problems, but it is not meant to be reality – it is a happy-ever-after from a time when the reader knows the world is going to be all but destroyed. We read it not to learn about the realities of interwar London, but to share the awe and delight of Miss P as she enters a new world & finds herself not only welcomed, but praised, when she never has been before. I think more books should be happy ever after, and tend to carry this one around with me to remind me that such things to exist.
Loved your comments and admire your fortitude and understand how the escape from reality in the pretty fantasy that is Miss Pettigrew can give reassurance that there is gay life in the world. Have you tried Eva Ibbetson’s books? On a par with Winifred Watson, her light touch, subtle humour, intelligence and way with characters, are delightful and I recommend such titles as ‘Song For Summer’, ‘Magic Flutes’ or ‘Morning Gift’, the latter I’m reading to my mother at the moment and she’s thoroughly enjoying it. It sounds as if your mum would enjoy these books too.
Good luck and God Bless
Jackie
Re: the references to “Eva Ibbetson” – in case anyone else tries to look her up (as I did) her name is spelt IBBOTSON, and she was mainly known for children’s books, incl. ‘Song for summer’ et al. Sorry, but as a librarian-turned-editor, I like to get the name right. You can find Eva Ibbotson on AbeBooks.
Eva Ibbotson, who died recently, was the daughter of Anna Gmeyner who wrote ‘Manja’, Persephone Book No. 39. She is known mainly as a children’s author.