Mrs Miniver
About this ebook
Meet Mrs. Miniver. She is the universal, heart-warming symbol of the endurable and pleasant sides of existence. Against the shadow of the present she holds up to view the everyday domesticities, the comings and goings of family life, and finds them good.
Mrs. Miniver at tea, Mrs. Miniver trying to discover what the windshield wiper is really saying, Mrs. Miniver and her three unpredictable children and her altogether too-predictable husband, Mrs. Miniver and the woman who said she could only accept the Really Nice Children as évacués—the writing and characters in these thumbnail sketches are disarmingly simple and recognizable, and yet, by the author's gift of intense observation, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and important.
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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 Eva Anstruther and spent her childhood in Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire, England.
She married her first husband, Anthony Maxtone Graham, a broker at Lloyd's, with whom she had three children, in 1923. Her second husband was Adolf Placzek, a Viennese art historian, whom she married in 1948.
In the 1930s she started to write for Punch magazine, and this brought her to the attention of The Times newspaper, where Peter Fleming asked her to write a series of columns for the paper, about "an ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life - rather like yourself". The character she created, Mrs Miniver, proved a huge success, and the columns were subsequently collected into book form in 1939.
Upon the outbreak of war, this book was used as the basis for a patriotic and sentimental film about Mrs Miniver, released in 1942, which won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
By this time, Struther had herself gone to America as a lecturer. In the 1940s she 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.
Following a mastectomy for breast cancer, she died of cancer in New York in 1953 at the age of 52. Her ashes are buried beside her father in the family grave at St. John The Evangelist Church, in Whitchurch.
