‘Mrs Miniver’

A column, a blog, a woman, a classic

In 1937 Joyce Anstruther, (writing as ‘Jan Struther’ so as not to be confused with her mother and grandmother) began a column for the London Times newspaper. It was to be a column about everyday woman’s things, her concerns and her life, so as to bring more women readers to the Times.

Such a column is rather like a blog; we can say that newspaper columns are the fathers of blogs. But Anstruther’s approach was different.

Rather than writing essays (as she had done for Punch the Spectator, and New Statesman), Anstruther created a fictional character, ‘Mrs Miniver’ based more or less upon her own life and situation. Here is the beginning of the first of those columns as collected in book form in Mrs Miniver:

IT was lovely, thought Mrs. Miniver, nodding good-bye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one's life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it. Not that she didn't enjoy the holidays: but she always felt — and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness — a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back. The spell might break, the atmosphere be impossible to recapture.

(From the online edition of the book, which you may, and should, find at: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/struther/miniver/miniver.html or among the collection of her works at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/struther/struther.html — I urge you to read these works, and compare Anstruther’s Mrs Miniver columns with her more traditional essays in the collection Try Anything Twice. For more about Anstruther’s own life, her Wikipedia entry is online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Struther and her grand-daughter Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s biography, The Real Mrs Miniver — Jan Struther’s Story published in London in 2001.)

When Anstruther framed her thoughts around the fictional Mrs Miniver, and caught essays in fragments of narration, she invited us to an intimacy that seems closer to the third-person creation than would have been possible to a first-person author. Because she invites us to approach Mrs Miniver obliquely, from the side as it were, we feel as though we spy upon her in her most unguarded, and therefore most truthful moments. The author ‘Jan Struther’ speaks to us ex cathedra when she offers her observations and pronouncements, which can be a bit off-putting: who is this Struther woman anyway, and why should we take her word for anything? we are apt to wonder. But a fictional character, in something that looks like a story — we take the bait and swallow it at a gulp.

A story is a wonderful thing. It beats the essay all hollow. And these half-stories Anstruther created are marvels of short form, conciseness, rare observation, and elliptical beauty.

The least of them is wonderful, and the best of them are small miracles.

Any of you who are bloggers should read and study the ‘Miniver’ columns, and prepare to be enlightened as to a whole other approach to your avocation.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, July 18, 2008)