Zest

David Reynolds

  • The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
    Murray, 314 pp, £17.99, November 2001, ISBN 0 7195 5541 8
  • Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther
    Virago, 153 pp, £7.99, November 2001, ISBN 1 85381 090 8

‘Perhaps it is too soon to call this one of the greatest motion pictures of all time,’ the New York Times said in June 1942, ‘but it is certainly the finest yet made about the present war, and a most exalting tribute to the British.’ The film was Mrs Miniver, whose heroine had come from a 1939 bestseller by the British writer Jan Struther. MGM’s 1942 movie had little else in common with her book, however, nor did its glossy portrait of a successful marriage correspond to the double life of Jan Struther. The film in fact took on an existence of its own, particularly in the United States, where it became a symbol of wartime Britain and a powerful evocation of Allied values. It also haunted Jan Struther to the end of her days.

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