![]() ![]() Just after Miss Pettigrew’s employment agency makes the error that sets the plot in motion, sending her to Miss LaFosse instead of a family seeking a governess, we see our hero out on the street: When Miss Pettigrew literally and metaphorically lets her hair down, steps out of her dowdy and threadbare governess clothes and starts hitting the sherry, she leaves behind a life that has been cruel, cold and pinched. ![]() It isn’t really a book about bad behaviour it’s about finding goodness. Just as bad, they missed one of the most charming things about Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: all the fun that Miss Pettigrew has is harmless. But Methuen had underestimated the reading public, who made the book a bestseller when it eventually came out. I’ve never been to a nightclub and I certainly didn’t know anyone who took cocaine.”Īll the more impressive that she worried her publishers so. I haven’t the faintest idea what governesses really do. Delightfully, she’d written the material that upset them in just six weeks, thinking up the dialogue while she did the dishes: “I didn’t know anyone like Miss Pettigrew. “They feared it was too risqué,” Watson told the Times in 2000, when she was 94 and her book was enjoying a second life after being republished by Persephone. It was so much fun that Winifred Watson’s original publisher Methuen became worried. ![]() An original illustration by Mary Thomson from Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. ![]()
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