MRS MINIVER

Greer Garson as the eponymous Mrs Miniver

There are a great many reasons to love Mrs Miniver - the film is wonderful, and the book, based on Jan Struther's newspaper columns for The Times, is even better. The film is, of course, a wonderfully uplifting piece of wartime propoganda - Churchill apparently said it did more for the allied cause than a flotilla of battleships -  but it's the character of Mrs Miniver herself which is the most interesting, at once subtle, wise and thoughtful. I'm particularly fond of this quotation;

“Mrs. Miniver suddenly understood why she was enjoying the forties so much better than she had enjoyed the thirties: it was the difference between August and October, between the heaviness of late summer and the sparkle of early autumn, between the ending of an old phase and the beginning of a fresh one.”


Jan Struther's book is still in print and has lost nothing of its charm. For a very entertaining, fictional account of wartime film making, do read Lissa Evans' marvellous book 'Their Finest Hour and a Half', long-listed for the 2009 Orange Prize.