The author of this book, Paul Gallico, joins a long list of those names whose books I used to stamp in and out when working in Highgate Library as a lippy teenager, all authors I sneeringly ignored as rather middle brow and 'nice'. Also included in this list were the Mapp and Lucia books of EF Benson, PG Wodehouse, Dorothy Whipple, E M Delafield and a myriad others. Well, I have learned my lesson, pity it has taken me so long and now read and love all these authors so when Mrs Harris goes to Paris, one of the latest tranche from the Bloomsbury Group, arrived I was looking forward to reading it. I had picked up a copy of the original book at a book fair last year though its title is different but had still not read it for some reason. I have a feeling it spent most of last year lurking at the bottom of my To be Read pile.
And what a treat I have been missing all these years. This latest edition also contains Mrs Harris goes to New York and it is inevitable that the thought of the Provincial Lady should pop into my mind when
contemplating Gallico's Mrs Harris. What a delight and a joy it was to sit down and read this straight through, forget taking my time so the joy would last longer, oh no had to be gulped down all in one go.
Mrs Harris is a char lady one, of those indomitable women who go out and 'do' for an assortment of clients. She is unfailingly plucky and cheerful, used to hard work and getting on with things, a down to earth woman who doesn't complain and doesn't grumble, an ordinary person contented with her lot until one day when she is at one of her clients, Lady Dant, she comes across a Dior dress. She has never seen anything so beautiful and so magical "drab and colourless as her existence would seem to have been, Mrs Harris had always felt a craving for beauty and colour .......she stood before the stunning creation hanging in the wardrobe and found herself face to face with a new kind of beauty - an artificial one created by the hand of man the artist, but aimed directly and cunningly at the heart of woman. In that very instant she fell victim to the artist; at that very moment there was born within her the craving to possess such a garment"
Mrs Harris has a small win on the pools and taking this as a sign that she is meant to have a dress by Dior she scrimps and slaves away until one day she finally has enough money to go to Paris. Off she goes little knowing that her life and the lives of those she comes into contact with will never be the same again. She meets Madame Colbert, the manageress at the House of Dior deeply unhappy because her husband is being passed over for promotion once again at the Foreign Office, the Marquis de Chassagne who she meets at the fashion show and who is reminded of his home sick days of his youth at university when his char woman was kind to him and made him feel at home, Natasha the glamorous model who hates her glamorous life and wishes to live in bourgeois respectability with a husband and children and Andrea Fauval an accountant, deeply in love with her but who knows he will never tell her so.
Impossible to convey in a post the sheer delight in Mrs Harris and how she transforms the lives of these people who become her friends. Impossible to describe what a treasure she is, how true and good she is, how determined to realise her dream. You will have to read the book and I do please urge you to do so and enjoy as much as I have done.
"For it had not been a dress she had bought so much as an adventure and an experience that would last her to the end of her days. She would never again feel lonely or unwanted. She had ventured into a foreign country and a foreign people whom she had been taught to suspect and despise. She had found them to be warm and human...they had made her feel that they loved her for herself. Mrs Harris hugged the dress to her thin bosom.............tears flowed again from the small shrewd blue eyes.....she stood there embracing her dress and with it she was hugging them all, Madame Colbert, Natasha, Andre Fauvel, down to the last anonymous worker, seamstress and cutter as well as the city that had bestowed upon her such a priceless memory, treasure of understanding, friendship and humanity"
See what I mean?
A gem, no other word for it. I simply adored this book and am not ashamed to say I had a tear or two in my eye at the end as well as Mrs Harris. So glad that the Bloomsbury Group are giving us all a chance to rediscover these neglected titles and introduce them to new readers or, in my case, an old reader who passed them by when young......
I am most grateful.
