Mrs. Miniver (Paperback)

~ (Author) "It was lovely, thought Mrs. Miniver, nodding goodbye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of..." (more)
Key Phrases: engagement book, Aunt Hetty, Lady Constance, Miss Bates (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

As a best-selling book and an Academy Award-winning movie. Mrs. Miniver's adventures have charmed millions. This edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the book's orginal publication in the U.S., features a new introduction by Greer Garson, who won the Academy Award as best actress for her role as Mrs. Miniver.

About the Author

Jan Struther was the pen name of Joyce Anstruther, later Joyce Maxtone Graham and finally Joyce Placzek (June 6, 1901 – July 20, 1953), an English writer remembered for her character Mrs. Miniver and a number of hymns, such as "Lord of All Hopefulness".

She was the daughter of Henry Torrens Anstruther and spent her childhood in Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire, England. An unhappy marriage to Anthony Maxtone Graham led to an affair with Adolf Placzek, a Viennese art historian 12 years her junior. After emigrating to the United States, the pair married in 1948.

In the 1940s Struther was a frequent guest panelist on the popular American radio quiz show Information Please, where she provided a warm and witty presence. She was one of the few women panelists to appear repeatedly on the program. In a possibly apocryphal story by fellow panelist Oscar Levant, Struther's appearances on the show stopped abruptly after she answered a question by referring to Agatha Christie's book Ten Little Niggers, which was the original British title of the book Ten Little Indians (later retitled And Then There Were None). Struther was supposedly so hurt and surprised by the backlash to her reference that she refused to appear on the show again. As well as the creation of the character Mrs Miniver in a fortnightly column in The Times, Struther is remembered for her hymns for children, including "Lord of All Hopefulness", "When a Knight Won His Spurs" and "Daisies are Our Silver". These resulted from an approach by Canon Percy Dearmer of Westminster Abbey, who in 1931 was commissioned by Oxford University Press to compile a collection of hymns. Ironically, Struther herself was an agnostic, and an unenthusiastic church-goer.

Struther is the subject of a biography, The Real Mrs. Miniver, written by her granddaughter, Ysenda Maxtone Graham. ISBN 0-7195-5541-8

She is the great-aunt of Ian Maxtone Graham, former co-executive producer of The Simpsons.

Product Details

• Paperback: 162 pages
• Publisher: Harvest Books (March 19, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156631407
• ISBN-13: 978-0156631402
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #80,807 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent essays on life in pre-World War II London, March 5, 2003

By	F. Orion Pozo "Orion Pozo" (Raleigh, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Quiet Drama of the Heart, October 6, 2000

By	Plume45 "kitka12345" (Westchester, NY) - See all my reviews

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A quiet delight, September 24, 2006

By	Nina M. Osier (Augusta, ME USA) - See all my reviews

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.