The Real Mrs Miniver

Ysenda Maxtone-Graham

The film "Mrs Miniver", starring Greer Garson, was a wartime classic. It took America by storm and won five Oscars. It was a war film, though with a difference in that it was not the handsome RAF pilot but his bride who was killed. Even now it is a classic "weepie"; in 1942, even isolationist Americans were stunned. Winston Churchill said Mrs Miniver would do more for the Allied cause that a flotilla of battleships. The book "Mrs Miniver" had likewise been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and its author, Jan Struther found it hard to persuade people that she herself was not its heroine. "I felt like a ventriloquist", she later said, "whose dummy had struck up an independent conversation with the audience". In the book the Minivers were happily married, but in real life Jan had drifted out of love with her conventional husband Tony and had fallen for an erudite Jewish refugee in the flight to the United States. For the whole war this had to be concealed, while Tony was a prisoner-of-war and guilt drove Jan around America as an unofficial ambassador. Only in 1948 could she marry her refugee, and five years later she died prematurely. The way in which Jan Struther's life unfolded is a microcosm of what the war could do to people.