Mrs. Miniver will be forever remembered from the 1942 film starring Greer Garson, showcasing the life of a war-time woman and her family, which won Academy Awards for Best Actress and Best Picture of the Year.
In 1937, writer Joyce Anstruther (writing under the pen name Jan Struther) was asked by The Times newspaper to create a column featuring an ordinary woman leading an ordinary life, and Mrs. Kay Miniver was born. The feature was a hit and these were compiled in book form in 1939.
This was not the novel I was expecting, rather a collection of short reminiscences on everyday life, based on her own family and experiences - buying a new car, shopping with the children, lunch on Hamstead Heath - even reflecting how nice their house looks on the street. The film portrayed the British everywomen, however, the Minivers have household staff and a country home named Starlings. Weekends at a friend's estate for shooting, a good supply of fruit all rear round, and visiting Scotland to the Highlands Games place them in upper society. There are darker entries where newsstands feature headlines about Jews, the family pick up their ordered gas masks, and Starlings is opened to children evacuated from London. Mrs. Miniver signs up for the ambulance service and helps in first aid class. There is preparation for what may come, but concern that the children know they are fighting against an idea, and not against a nation.
I enjoy reading about this period in England, but without the dramatic tension a novel might elicit, I found these ordinary. So plain you can see how Hollywood could easily place the template of sentiment and nostalgia on the events. At the time of publication, America was neutral, but Mrs. Miniver was such a success engaging public sympathy that Churchill claimed it did more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships.
In one of the final entries, she writes of the hundreds of ways war has brought them to their senses. "It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use our legs and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have."
1939 / Hardcover / 288 pages
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