Customer Reviews

Mrs. Miniver

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
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I was raised working class with immigrant parents and don't normally like characters like Mrs. Miniver, an upper middle class British housewife with a country home and servants. Yet I was enchanted by these 37 essays that originally appeared in the London Times between 1937 and 1939.

We don't even learn the first name of the lead character until the very end of the book. She is always Mrs. Miniver, and her husband is always Clem. The Minivers are close, but they don't ever act intimate.

Even though the essays are in the third person (except for the letter at the end where we learn her first name), this is one of the most intimate looks into a woman's mind I have ever read. The author's love of language and the details of daily life are revealed through the thoughts of this delightful character.

The essays were published in the Times every two weeks for the two years leading up to the British entry into World War II. Although the preparations for war are discussed in later essays, they mostly deal with the everyday lives of this typical middle class family. The essays became a symbol of the essence of British life and were published in book form as the war began. The US edition includes an additional essay where Mrs. Miniver prepares her first Christmas shopping list of the war.

The American cinema made an Oscar-winning movie with the same title starring Greer Garson, but the plot of the movie has nothing to do with the subject of these brief disconnected short stories. This is a wonderful book that I will cherish for a long time. Highly recommended.

This fragile piece of literature should be included in a course of feminist literature called Woman's World. The setting happens to be pre WW2 Britain (London, the country and Scotland), but Struther's sentiments and gentle insights into a woman's heart are truly timeless and universal in appeal. All mothers can relate to Mrs. Miniver's private thoughts, triumphs and fears re her children, who grow up by three years in these short pages. All wives can empathize with her rarely successful attempts to communicate meaningfully with her predictable husband. Lastly, women the world over will appreciate her mental meanderings, which are sporadically stimulated by banal objects, chance meetings and the shifting of the seasons.

At this point I wish to inject a gentle warning to those readers who expect a clearly-deliniated plot, high drama or profound character development. Our Mrs. Miniver remains delightfully stable in her own way, as she views the vagaries and fluctuations of her private world. Rather, we are expected to enter into a tacit collaboration with this modest heroine. Truly one wonders just how much the author has infused of herself into this soft-spoken Everywoman. We understand that a woman's domain--in any age--signifies the preparation of the maternal, spousal and societal hearths, in order to keep man from reverting to a more primitive state.

We applaud as this unassuming English lady musters internal strength when required to leave her personal comfort zone, in order to meet her social obligations. With warmth and compassion Mrs. Miniver handles most challenges in her relaxed existence, as she shares her uniquely feminine eye-view of life, especially in a world on the brink of global war. Consisting of dozens of short vignettes with little seeming relevance to each other, this literary gem will prove a delicate treasure of the female pscyhe, for those who read with their heart.

Like so many other readers, I picked this book up expecting the written version of the Greer Garson film. As soon as I read the author's thanks to the Times for allowing her to republish a series of articles carried by that newspaper in the pre-war years, though, I realized that wasn't what I was about to read. So I adjusted my expectations, settled back, and thoroughly enjoyed Mrs. Miniver in her original incarnation. The war doesn't begin until the book's final vignette, although its looming threat is hinted at many times in the earlier ones.

Jan Struther's articles share with us the life of Mrs. Miniver, a happily married Londoner who has a second home in Kent and three perfectly normal children. Like other women of her time and class, she has no need to be employed at anything but living the proper social life, and directing the activities of her servants so that husband Clem will have a haven to come to every night and a competent hostess to entertain their friends and business contacts. Clem appears to be a building contractor, which makes such contacts especially important.

So far, so boring. Except that Mrs. Miniver has a keen mind, and an equally keen awareness of her own emotions and the triggers that rouse them. Each article's vividly written descriptions of routine events in an average woman's life not only involve the reader's senses; they also offer, subtly and therefore effectively, philosophical comments that any thinking person can't help responding to with recognition. We've lived what Mrs. Miniver has lived, all of us, despite being separated from her world by gulfs of time and space. Between those moments (at least one, but usually several, per article) and Struther's beautiful use of everyday language, this book turns out to be a quiet delight.

This book feels like a stream of kindly and observant words into a forgotten age.

It chronicles London life for an upper Middle class family immediately prior to WW2, as seen by the woman of the family unit. It captures an essential and sedate sense of Britishness long since lost and it is written with sad eye on the changes to come almost as if it anticipates them. This seems to be why the author takes such intense pleasure in the ordinary and brings such events to life, vividly, with huge empathy and comfort. There are elements of it's purpose and philosophy in the film version, but the film is much more dramatic and by and large bares no resemblence to the novel.

Being British, and having had family who survived the Blitz and the horrors of WW2, this book brought me to tears often for it must have captures the price paid for war, so eloquently.

The books emotive power lies in it's solid sense of it's time and in the sense of all that is to change. It's pleasent sense of ordinary, comfortable and uneventful plodding is strangely powerful.

This book shows the characterization of the woman in the film, but Hollywood definitely took some huge liberties with the plot line. As this is always the case, I expected some minor differences, but this is completely different. The novel was published before the Battle of Britain, and the author obviously didn't know the future. Hollywood at the time wanted to use headlines for film fodder, so it's only a matter of course that they should change the plot of the novel to suit the times. Both the movie and the novel are worthwhile.

While I was reading this book, I was constantly amazed by Struthers' ability to put into words the most abstract concepts and ideas, like assigning colors to days of the week and describing fireworks. . . While the story didn't really hold my interest, because it seems to be hidden inside a gauzy layer of images and hidden meanings, the images and hidden meanings themselves were fascinating and I found that I couldn't wait to read what would be said next. Worth reading, if only to be for a few hours in awe of a truly gifted and insightful writer, one whose grasp of the seemingly undefinable is much stronger than her ability to construct a dynamic plot (which, in the book's defense, is not its goal at all).

Having loved the classic Greer Garson film of the same name, I was very much looking forward to reading the book upon which it was based. Imagine my surprise when I opened the first page to discover that the book is a series of articles based on Mrs. Miniver's largely peacetime life. I hasten to add that this isn't a criticism. What is found in this slim volume is a deeply-layered exploration of Mrs. Miniver's personal beliefs, quiet integrity and dry sense of humor.

Language is something to be treasured and savored here. Struther plays with words in a way that is, for lack of a better term, delicious. I found myself reading and re-reading segments because of the beautiful way in which they were phrased. The life that the Minivers lead consists of trips to their country home in Kent, dinners with friends, and holiday celebrations, all archly and candidly observed by Mrs. Miniver. The War, while looming on the horizon, does not take over until the very end of the book.

I got this book with the expectation that I'd read about the things I'd seen in the film. What I ended up with was something much different. It takes nothing away from my love of Greer Garson to say that I loved Jan Struther's original stories just as much as the movie that grew out of them.

Snippets of every day life in the years preceding World War II are captured in the most charming way in this little book. A collection of short stories and essays written by the fictional Miss Miniver, the book has neither plot nor fully developed characters (except for Mrs. Miniver herself) and yet it fulfills that one basic requirement of great literature: it leaves an impression on the mind that lasts long after the final page has been turned. Mrs. Miniver's musings on life, family, love, happiness and society all serve to underscore some basic truth that is often taken for granted, expressing them in a way that touches the reader's heart and reminds her ever so gently of how very fragile the treasures of this life can be. Poignant and insightful, Mrs. Miniver's observations are couched in thoroughly beautiful prose that elicits a deep feeling of connection and understanding, even today. I can't do the book justice and trust my favorite quotes to highlight just how very touching the book, at its best, can be.

"Clem caught her eye across the table. It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch."

"Outside the air was delicious. She could feel it stroking her face...but there was no sensation of either warmth or chill....on certain days, and this was one of them, the barriers were down. She felt as though she and the outside world could mingle...as though she was not entirely contained in her own body but was part also of every other person in the street; and, for that matter, of the thrush singing on a tree...the cat stepping delicately across Buckingham Palace Road. This was the real meaning of peace...an active consciousness of unity..."

"She was every relationship as a pair of intersecting circles. The more they intersected, it would seem at first glance, the better the relationship; but this is not so. Beyond a certain point, the law of diminishing returns sets in, and there aren't enough private resources left on either side to enrich the life that is shared. Probably perfection is reached when the area of the two outer crescents, added together, is exactly equal to that of the leaf-shaped piece in the middle."

"...you cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past."

"This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day's pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears."

This was not the book my husband remembered from his childhood, but was very entertaining, none the less. It arrived in a timely manner and in good shape.

I re-read this book every year at the start of the holiday season. It reminds me of what they are about - family, home, and the quiet joys of tradition and domestic tranquility. I love her keen observances of people and everyday objects. And I feel the same way about engagement books! I have bought copies for all my favorite women.