ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

My copy of Mrs Miniver is an original wartime edition of this famous little book, which began life as a puff-piece in The Times but when war came the story grew to become the voice of stoic Britain.  The cover is austerity brown paper, there are no pictures – only text – on the front and back covers, and the pages are speckled with age.  It feels like the very book that my mother would surely have read.

The Minivers are from the ‘professional classes’.  There’s a boy at Eton, daddy is an architect.  In chapter one an anonymous someone responds when Mrs M contentedly rings the bell for tea, and in chapter two an un-named ‘garage-hand’ brings the car round in the morning.  Mrs M is comfortable and mildly complacent but not unaware of how fortunate she is to be able to take pleasure in the everyday.  While naively believing that she understands what life is like for the Other, Mrs Miniver hasn’t forgotten their financial ups-and-downs when they were too hard-up to afford a taxi home after dinner out.

But the book is only deceptively twee: read carefully and you will find that Struther is a sharp observer.  There is sly mockery of ‘Lady Courtney Butfish’ who will only take ‘really nice children’ as evacuees, and only then if it is really necessary and doesn’t upset the servants.  There is boredom at county parties with people so out-of-touch with the need to work that they would ‘have gone to the guillotine rather than use the expression ‘week-end’ ‘(p11).  For Lady Chervil and her ilk, Mrs Miniver has rehearsed an acceptable answer if asked her opinion of blood sports: they are ‘indefensible but irresistible’ because any objection to hunting ‘was bound in that company to be a tedious and unprofitable discussion’. (p13)

For those not au fait with the pre-war British class system, it’s a bit confusing.  Mrs Miniver travels by bus and thinks twice about buying an expensive ‘engagement book’ (a diary) but when her charwoman isn’t well she has to go in search of a replacement herself, wandering bewildered through a council estate.  When things go wrong all at once and ‘one must put on spiritual dungarees and remain in them until things are running smoothly again’  it is she, not a housekeeper or butler, who must sort things out until once again household matters are a ‘low, distant humming in the background’ (p92).

Unlike the famous film, the book focusses on the period before war was declared and the Phoney War, but the sense of domestic safety is nonetheless shattered when they queue up with everyone else to collect their gas masks.  There is Mrs Miniver and Nannie; Judy and Toby; Mrs Adie the Scots cook,  and Gladys, the house-parlourmaid.  (Vin is presumably away at school, and Clem must be at work).  Yes, this is a considerable household by our standards, but they all share the same patriotic ambition: ‘we were fighting against an idea, and not against a nation’ (p61).

The Minivers have a house in London, and ‘Starlings‘ in Kent (not quite ‘top-drawer’!) and though they have enough cash to then also buy Old Parsloe’s Cottage, they do it up themselves, ‘painting and whitewashing and carpentering and digging and weeding and planting’ (p90).  The war changes this kind of labour from a choice to a necessity when they have to join in the local hop-harvest because so many of the labourers have joined up.

And Mrs Miniver is alert to the incongruities of the English class system.  In London in August when the well-bred are in the countryside, the ‘great tide of perambulators’ from the ‘nursery tea-tables of Bayswater, Kensington, Brompton, Belgravia and Mayfair’ is replaced by children who are ‘whey-faced, thin, ragged, merry and shrewd’ (p112).  Between the lines we can see her asking herself where those children play when those prams are there.  Naively, (for how could Struther have known then what miseries evacuation could bring?)  Mrs Miniver thinks that one benefit of the war would be that evacuation would enable these children to see ‘cows, and running streams, and growing corn‘ which they would otherwise never see unless a ‘miracle happened’. But, she gently suggests, perhaps ‘the structure [of society] could be changed without altering the texture’ (p113).  Was Struther a closet Leftie??

The most quoted passage from Mrs Miniver comes towards the end of the book when the family has decamped to Starlings:

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, and that is about the severest criticism our civilization could have. (p123)

Well, yes, there are other criticisms that one might have of imperial Britain, and yes, it is a bit sentimental, and I did wonder a little bit if Mrs Miniver’s blossoming awareness of how the other half lived was perhaps influenced by her experiences in less class-conscious America where she went on a lecture tour not long after the war started – but it’s a charming little book nonetheless. (It’s only 128 pages long).

Hollywood made Mrs Miniver into a film (which I haven’t seen) but I found this perceptive review which applies in some respects to the book as well.  However Jan Struther was very annoyed about the sequel, and eventually sued MGM for ‘killing off her character’ .   But I suspect that it wasn’t really MGM that killed off Mrs Miniver at all, it was post-war austerity and the social changes that accompanied it.

You can read Mrs Miniver online if you life, but I’d recommend that you try to find an authentic old edition like mine…

PS I was prompted to read Mrs Miniver by the Virago Reading Week which promotes reading the work of women writers.  I do have heaps of Virago titles on my shelves, but my Mrs Miniver wasn’t one of them.

PPS I am indebted to the Mrs Miniver digital edition for some of the biographical information above, and also to Wikipedia.

Author: Jan Struther
Title: Mrs Miniver
Publisher: Chatto and Windus, 1939
No ISBN
Source: Personal copy, found in an Op Shop somewhere for $6.00 AUD.