Alba’s edition includes the original illustrations by Mary Thompson which, in combination with the text, lead one not to leave a smile at any time during the reading.
Posterity has strange paths. And if not, tell them winifred watson, a forgotten British writer, who in just ten years, from 1934 to 1945, developed a career of ephemeral success. Then the silence. The zenith had arrived with ‘Miss Pettigrew’s Big Day‘, a delicious erotic-sentimental comedy that read today is a candid reissue of the Cinderella tale but that at the time it appeared (1938) its editor initially considered excessively daring for English moral canons (it must be remembered that ‘Lady Chatterley’s lover‘ appeared in 1928 could not be published in Great Britain until 1960). Luckily, reality did not prove him right and the novel with its liveliness, its sharp and malicious dialogues and its crazy joy lit up the uncertain days before the outbreak of World War II like a beautiful flare.
Then came the contest and no one was up for escapist stories about women who empower themselves through sex, alcohol and nightclubs, no matter how much ‘mainstream’ intention they had. Hollywood came to buy the rights to the novel but the ashen spirit of the moment was stronger and the film was not made. It took seven decades for the project to crystallize into an adaptation with Frances McDormand and Amy Adams in 2008, prompted by the happy rediscovery of the work in 2000, a success that Watson herself came to enjoy at the age of 94, two years before her death. It must also be remembered that the film in question, ‘A great day for them’, was a pale reflection of this sparkling story.
Watson marks with a frenetic rhythm -from 9:15 in the morning until well after 3:47 in the morning in chapters that take place without giving the reader a chance to relax- in the time arc of one day, D-Day in the existence of the protagonist, the titular Miss Pettigrew, a 40-year-old woman -age then considered much more mature than today- governess and daughter of a parish priest. Hers has been a gray life, devoted to others without her having received any affective reward for it.
A good mistake, worthy of the best vaudeville, causes Pettigrew to end up as an employee of Delysia Lafosse, a young singer with nothing on her mind, who balances so that none of her three lovers know the existence of the others, while she sings herself with champagne and lines of cocaine. It’s not an uplifting kind of life, but for the governess it’s a window into the glamorous life she’s glimpsed in the movies (and here one could draw a parallel between her and the Mia Farrow from ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’) and that in the end brings him much more happiness than in the virtuous and ‘decent’ environments in which he has lived up to now without finding in them the slightest trace of understanding and affection. Her reward is to be appreciated and recognized in that immoral world.
Impossible to be scandalized by it. That is what the readers of this work, the daughter of its time, must have interpreted in the 1930s. Today some declaredly xenophobic comments on the work – not very different from those that we can read in a work by Christie Agatha– could shock us and it is appreciated that no one has tried to debug them because they are giving valuable information about a way of life that has little to do with our current canons. The Alba edition includes the original illustrations of mary thompson that in combination with the text lead to not abandoning the smile at any time during the reading. A pleasure.