Review: Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther

Hardcover, 288 pages
Published 1940 (contents: 1937-39)

Borrowed from the library

Read August 2016

Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther

A couple years ago, casting about for short fiction to teach in my class on British literature from 1890 to 1950, I took a friend's recommendation of this book, which chronicles the life of one family in the years leading up to World War II. I skimmed around it a bit, selected eight likely-looking chapters, scanned them, and assigned them to my class. Sometime later, as part of a project to watch all the films of every book I taught that semester, I watched the two films based on the book, Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Miniver Story (1950). (The first one is pretty good; the second one not as much.) But I hadn't read the book, and that seemed like a thing I ought to do, and now I finally have.

Mrs. Miniver is, as Professor Tom Recchio calls Cranford, an "accidental novel." It was originally a single newspaper column, "Mrs. Miniver Comes Home," in the Times of London on October 6, 1937. It was successful enough to warrant further accounts of Mrs. Miniver and her upper-middle-class family in Chelsea (with a home in the country); there were a total of thirty-six columns published up to September 29, 1939, three weeks after the U.K. declared war on Germany. This, though, is what makes it fascinating. The war breaks in on this family by accident, much as it would have in real life. Mrs. Miniver did not begin life as a novel, and it did not begin life as a war story-- it was a simple series of domestic sketches. But it became a war story because as the 1930s rolled on, everyone's domestic story became a war story.

So there's no foreshadowing or anything. At the beginning, it's just domestic observations from Mrs. Miniver as her husband buys a new car, or Christmas day rolls around, or they see fireworks on Guy Fawkes day, or she tries to figure out how you deal with a married couple where you only like one of its members, or they drive up to Scotland to see the Highland Games. There are lots of cute observations on what marriage is like, or on what other people's marriages are like, or on the fact that if someone is "terribly fond of children," a kid never actually knows where they stand with such a person! I really like what Mrs. Miniver observes on the morning of Christmas 1937, as her children go at the contents of their stockings way too early in the morning: "There were sounds of movement in the house; they were within measurable distance of the blessed chink of early morning tea. Mrs. Miniver looked towards the window. The dark sky had already paled a little in its frame of cherry-pink chintz. Eternity framed in domesticity. Never mind. One had to frame it in something, to see it at all."

But then, all of a sudden it's September 28, 1938, Germany is about to annex the Sudetenland, it seems like war is imminent, and Mrs. Miniver has to take her children to get fitted for gas masks just in case. From that point on, the coming war is a shadow that hangs over the domestic life of the Minivers. You couldn't have planned this, and that's why it works so well. The previously idyllic life of the Minivers has been disturbed by a phenomenon they hadn't predicted, and Mrs. Miniver is hoping that this war can go better than the last one: "if the worst came to the worst, these children would at least know that we were fighting against an idea, and not against a nation"-- they need to guard against war-time's "slow, yellow, drifting corruption of the mind."

The war brings out the best in the nation, Mrs. Miniver argues, but in a way that's a bit disappointing. She writes in a letter to her sister-in-law, after the declaration of war: "I can think of a hundred ways already in which the war has 'brought us to our senses.' But it oughtn't to need a war to make a nation paint its kerbstones white, carry rear-lamps on its bicycles, and give all its slum children a holiday in the country. And it oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have." And it doesn't bring out the best in everyone, either; she recounts talking to a woman who won't promise to billet London children in her country house because it will upset the servants, who says, "Even if the worst does come to the worst, you must make it quite clear to the authorities that I can only accept Really Nice Children."

The book ends, as I said before, shortly after the declaration of war on Germany, with a letter from Mrs. Miniver to her sister-in-law. But apparently Jan Struther did continue to story of Mrs. Miniver and family, with five more dispatches published in the Times during the war, but as the edition I got from the library is from 1940, it doesn't include. You can read the whole book in an authorized e-edition, however, on the University of Pennsylvania website, and I should get around to reading those five later chapters soon.

The columns in the Times were wildly popular. When I was skimming the Times digital archive to examine the book in its original context, I found a number of letters from adoring fans. Many speculated on Mrs. Miniver's first name, which wasn't revealed until the 29 Sept. 1939 column. My favorite of the letters I found, however, was this one: [Clem is Mrs. Miniver's husband, Vin and Toby sons.]

The relationship between the book and the film is actually kind of weird, because the film begins shortly before the war and goes through its first couple years. In that way, it's actually more like a sequel to the book than an adaptation of it, because it's entirely about coping with wartime life. However, the details don't line up perfectly-- the Minivers' class status is downgraded in the film a bit, apparently to make things more palatable to American audiences. The Minivers ride out an attack in a bomb shelter, Mr. Miniver participates in the evacuation of Dunkirk, a downed German flier breaks into the Miniver home (the film Mrs. Miniver is less sympathetic to him than I think the novel one would be), and so on. The first film doesn't really line up with the second, either; one of the kids somehow hasn't got any older, another has got a lot older, and a third has completely vanished! But the first film is really good (it won six Academy Awards), and I highly recommend it. You'll also get to discover that Julian Fellowes plagiarized a Downton Abbey subplot from it.

Coda
About a week after I wrote this review, I read the five WWII-era installments of Mrs. Miniver on my Kindle. They're okay-- worth tracking down if your edition doesn't include them. The first is the best, a story of Mrs. Miniver working on her Christmas list, but this time there is a passel of refugee children along as well, many of whom never had a Christmas tree before. The other four are more letters from Mrs. Miniver to her sister-in-law; the worst of these is the last one, which is a very defensive over-explanation of her second-last letter, explaining why she was not overlooking members of the lower classes. I suspect Struther had received a lot of angry letters.