Winnifred Watson is like Jane Austen on crack. Or Jane Austen with crack. Or maybe Watson is similar to Austen, and her book, "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day," is totally like crack.
After this year’s Academy Awards, during which she charmed the cattiest of red-carpet paparazzi and then later overcame jitters to sing solo in front of millions of film fans, Amy Adams can no longer be considered a new, relatively unknown face. Still, I feel duty-bound to point out that Elle was one of the first magazines to give the lovely actress her due, starting with an enthusiastic shout-out in our November "Women in Hollywood" issue, followed by the full-on cover girl treatment in March. So I’ve been looking forward to Adams’ new film, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, for months.
As homework, I just started reading the novel on which the film is based. It’s a surprisingly modern feminist fairy tale about a dowdy, down-trodden spinster who shrugs off the bonds of virtue and propriety for one day in order to experience how the other, non-virtuous, half lives. Miss Pettigrew finds herself suddenly thrust into a world she thought only existed in the movies, involving lots of indiscriminately jolly sex, cocaine, seedy nightclubs, dangerous gentlemen, foxy ladies, and dubious cocktails with names like “Snake’s Venom.” Acting as a de facto lady-in-waiting to a glamorous starlet named Delysia LaFosse, Miss Pettigrew gambols about London to the tune of lines like this one: "She was a gentlewoman ranker out on the spree, and, oh shades of a monotonous past, would she spree!" But beneath the candy floss, this novel contains golden nuggets of wisdom concerning the beauty of female solidarity and the importance of self-actualization. Simply irresistible!
My friend Priya Jain recently wrote an interesting feature for Film in Focus about the story behind the story behind the movie. In it, she explains that the author of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Winifred Watson, was popular English chick-lit writer who wrote just six books about love and marriage (sound familiar?). Miss Pettigrew (published in 1938) was a bit of a departure for Watson, and its representation of life in London's fast lane made it almost scandalously racy for its time. When her publisher balked, Watson swore that the book would be a winner (she also agreed to churn out another of her standard bodice-rippers as collateral). She was right, and the book's charms endure today. Unfortunately, Watson's writing career was one of the many casualties of WWII, and these six books (and now this one movie) are all that remain of her legacy.
I’m off to finish the book. I’m lapping it up, "as the vulgar say, with eager gulps!”