Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Watson wrote and published six novels in the late 1930s, and was something of a celebrity in her day. Miss Pettigrew - a kind of aberration not at first welcomed by her publishers, but later a bestseller - is a fairy story. Guinevere Pettigrew, the 40-year-old daughter of a north-country curate, is down on her luck and desperate for a job. Now living in London, all she can offer is domestic and child-care experience, but she‘s not particularly good at either. Sent by an agency for interview by Miss Dylesia La Fosse, a night-club singer, she finds herself instantly still uninterviewed, embroiled in Dylesia‘s shockingly Bohemian life-style. Even more disorientating, she takes to it like an ugly duckling to water. Underneath her austere exterior Miss Pettigrew is a secret, subconscious swan - a raver, and bossy with it. In no time at all she‘s wearing make-up, drinking alcohol, running Dylesia‘s love-life - and other people‘s too. And they‘re grateful. All this can only lead to happy endings. The style is deceptively ‘novelettish‘. Some of the dialogue is cleverly and hilariously convoluted. Miss Pettigrew is a much shrewder operator than we at first think; her very innocence and down-to-earth common-sense protect her from the worst excesses of sophisticated London life. It‘s no wonder people who read it on publication still remember it fondly as their favourite book. The black-and-white illustrations are dead-right for the period. A book definitely to sneak back to in moments of depression. (Kirkus UK)