Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is a delightful book centring around a middle-aged prudish governess, who has no money and desperately needs a job to click. One morning, a serendipitous incident sees her knock on the door of a beautiful young cabaret singer, instead of a household abound with ill-disciplined children, for a job. However, she never gets an opportunity to state her purpose, but gets caught up in the dramatic life of Miss LaFosse instantaneously.
Miss LaFosse and Miss Pettigrew are as different as night and day - the former has numerous lovers, a frivolous lifestyle and many-a-friend, whereas Miss Pettigrew is alone, and in her own words, some day she would be, with no home, no friends, no husband, no children. Yet, as they say, opposites attract, and that certainly holds true for these two women who might as well have come from totally different planets. Caught up in the wonder of Miss LaFosse's lifestyle, Miss Pettigrew allows herself to be "made up", wears fancy gowns, and goes to a cocktail party as well as a night club - each second of the day lifts her morale and confidence a little bit more. She thinks quickly on her feet, resolves tiffs, freely gives relationship advice, and ends up seeming a whole lot worldlier than she actually is.
The book, spanning twenty-four hours, literally describes how Miss Pettigrew "lives for a day," and how she's resigned to her fate of misery and loneliness.
Oh, if only for once the Lord would be good and cause some miracle to happen to keep her here, to see for one day how life could be lived, so that for all the rest of her dull, uneventful days, when things grew bad, she could look back in her mind and dwell on the time when for one perfect day, she, Miss Pettigrew, lived.
This is one of those feel-good books, where you just have a giant smile on your face while reading it. The dialogue is witty, the writing clever, and the words literally lift off the page and dance in front of the reader. Miss Pettigrew is not a typical hero, but, you just want her to have her day!
While this book was written in the 1930s (1938), the environment and narrative seems relatively modern. The women have a flair for the dramatic, and their enthusiasm and frivolity (for lack of better words) is contagious.
It's no use, we women just can't help ourselves. When it comes to love we're born adventurers.
Still, you do wonder about quotes like the below (which is probably the most blatant hint that the book was published pre-World War II):
I wouldn’t advise marrying him. I don’t like jumping to conclusions but I think there was a little Jew in him. He wasn’t quite English.
Rating: A-