Mrs. Miniver

Book excerpt: The beloved classic novel of an English housewife bravely enduring WWII—the basis for the Academy Award–winning film starring Greer Garson. Winston Churchill once remarked that Mrs. Miniver, the fictional British housewife featured in Jan Struther’s newspaper columns about quotidian English life, did more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships. As tensions rose across Europe, Mrs. Miniver’s domestic concerns expanded from automobiles and Christmas shopping to include gas masks, keeping calm, and carrying on. An international sensation when it was first published, this novelized collection of those columns won America’s heart—and broad public support for entering WWII. Mrs. Miniver’s story was so essential to Allied morale that when William Wyler’s film adaption was made, President Roosevelt ordered it rushed to theaters.