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Anonymous
Posted January 24, 2012
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Excellent essays on life in pre-World War II London
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.
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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. -
Anonymous
Posted September 24, 2006
A quiet delight
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.
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