Mrs. Miniver

Mrs. Miniver was a fictional English housewife created by Jan Struther in 1937 for a series of newspaper columns for The Times, later adapted into a movie.

Book publication

The columns were first published in book form in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of war. Struther stopped the regular newspaper columns that year, but wrote a series of letters from Mrs. Miniver, expanding on the character's wartime experiences. These were published in later editions.

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The book became an enormous success, especially in the United States, where Struther went on a lecture tour shortly after the book's release.

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Although the US was still neutral, the tribulations of the Miniver family as war with Nazi Germany arrived engaged the sympathy of the American public sufficiently that President Franklin D. Roosevelt credited it for hastening America's involvement in the war, and Winston Churchill claimed that it had done more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships.

Related Topics:
Nazi Germany - Franklin D. Roosevelt - Winston Churchill

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