Mrs Miniver

Struther, Jan, 1901-19532024

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Summary

Mrs Miniver began life in 1937 when its author, Jan Struther, was commissioned to write occasional columns for The Times about ‘an ordinary sort of woman – like yourself’ and this she did. Like the real-life Jan Struther, Mrs Miniver is a young married woman living in Chelsea (very close to ‘Greenery Street’, PB No. 35), who shops in the King’s Road, discusses the week’s menus with cook, enjoys her children only as much as she wants to, and drives up to Scotland for the ‘glorious twelfth’. The most significant sentence is at the end of the first column when ‘with a little sigh of contentment [she] rang for tea.’ Some of us will find this slightly enraging since there are now probably only about ten people in the UK, not counting Queen Camilla, who ring for tea. But annoyance is the wrong way to react. The better way is to see the book as a historical document about the everyday life of the English upper-middle classes during the 1930s, a life that would change dramatically and for ever during the war. It’s a world as distant from us now as the Victorian period, but that does not stop the book from being highly entertaining, fun and interesting.