But once those giddy hours are over, she is very much afraid she will have to go back to her drab, near-unbearable life. She gets swept up in the hedonistic lifestyle of her employer and over the next 24 hours experiences the most intoxicating period of her life. Before she has a chance to clear up the misunderstanding, she becomes involved in Delysia’s complicated love life and, with her level-headed, prim attitude and warm-hearted if slightly bossy style of questioning, she soon gains Delysia’s trust and gratitude.

It is a fairy-tale, a Cinderella story of a middle-aged, downtrodden governess who is sent by mistake to the apartment of a glamorous nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, rather than a household full of unruly children. It was – for once – not relegated to the underground storage room of the library, but up proud and yellow on the ‘mood boosting books’ shelf. It has the feel and style of those 1930s Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers comedies which I used to watch after coming home from school in the afternoon, before I sat down to do my homework. It is sweet without being too sickly, an escapist fairytale with a good dose of humour and wisecracks to keep it grounded. The film attempts to raise the emotional temperature by setting it on the very eve of the Second World War (scary headlines, soldiers carrying gas masks, practice of air-raid sirens creating panic) and by bringing together the sensible Pettigrew, who lost her fiance on the Western Front, and a wealthy bachelor (Ciarn Hinds), who regrets the frivolous life he's led since the Great War.I’m sorry I did not take the advice of my fellow bloggers AT ONCE and dive into this charming, funny novel by Winifred Watson. The story is exactly like a brittle 1930s comedy of the type always described as risque and it's the stuff of those old British quota quickies made to help cinemas fulfil their obligation to exhibit locally produced movies. Frances McDormand, sporting an excellent English accent, plays Guinevere Pettigrew, an honest, strait-laced governess, who accidentally becomes the social secretary to flighty American actress Delysia Lafosse, who's juggling three lovers a penniless pianist just out of jail (Lee Pace), a suave Anglo-Italian nightclub owner (Mark Strong) and a rich, young man about town (Tom Payne) who's going to put her into a West End comedy called Pile on the Pepper. Bharat Nalluri's Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a much more attractive Anglo-American collaboration, co-scripted by Simon Beaufoy (author of The Full Monty) and the American who wrote Finding Neverland, David Magee, and based on a recently rediscovered 1938 novel by Winifred Watson.

Miss pettigrew lives for a day novel