She is thin (not elegantly slender) and her complexion is poor because she doesn’t have enough good food to eat. He’s still living a comfortable, idle life, moving effortlessly in society and handicapped only by his poor marriage prospects.

But her genteel poverty is unlike that of the handsome, well-dressed young aristocrat Freddy Eynsford-Hill in Pygmalion. Miss Pettigrew – daughter of a curate – is one of the genteel poor. In amongst the froth and bubble, the escapades, the witty repartee and the glamour of an entertaining farce, there is also social commentary. There she stumbles into situations in which her naïveté and innate strength of character make her invaluable to Miss La Fosse, and, powdered and primped and dressed in borrowed finery, she ends up attracting a Nice Rich Man as well.īut that’s not all there is to the story. First published in 1938 and set in the interwar years, it tells the story of a ‘spinster’: a poor, plain, dowdy, middle-aged, unemployed nursery-governess who is mistakenly sent to answer a job advertisement as a housekeeper in the home of a glamorous actress called Delysia La Fosse. Well, yes, Miss Pettigrew is, superficially, a lightweight confection. But no, that’s what 1001 Books says too, more or less, in a contribution from a Dr Meg Jensen from Kingston University, wherever that might be. The Cinderella theme mentioned by Twycross-Martin in the intro seemed a bit lightweight for 1001 Books, especially since she mentions Winifred Watson’s novels in the same company as Catherine Cookson’s, with common themes of women having second chances, adapting to change, moving on. I discovered after I’d finished reading the book and went to list it as ‘read’ at Goodreads, that I’d marked it as one of the 1001 Books that I’m supposed to read before I die.

Hers is merely biographical, and attends very little to the issues raised by the book. I mention this because both publishers spruce up the text for a contemporary audience with an introduction by an eminent critic, but those in the Text Classics series that I’ve read are infinitely superior to the introduction for Miss Pettigrew by Cambridge scholar Henrietta Twycross-Martin.

It’s a reprint by Persephone Books who specialise in reprinting neglected 20th century women writers, (similar in spirit to the Text Classics series which specialises in out of-print Australian classics). The title looked familiar when I saw this book on display at the library, so I brought home Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson (1906-2002).

Winifred watson miss pettigrew