Uma biografia fascinante
Autor: Sergio Jones | Publicado: 2012-10-01T14:16:00-07:00








The Real Mrs. Miniver

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Isenda Maxtone Graham





In 1937 the Court Page of the London Times began publishing a series of articles featuring a charming, upper-middle class English housewife named Mrs Miniver. The articles depicted an idyllically happy family with three children, a house in London, and a country cottage called Starlings.&nbsp;




Two years later, Mrs Miniver was published in book form. While some critics derided the book as sentimental, many readers embraced it as a symbol of an increasingly endangered English way of life, and it went on to become the #1 bestseller in America. The Hollywood film, released in 1942 with Greer Garson in the title role, won five Oscars, including Best Picture, and did so much to promote the American war effort in Europe that even Josef Goebbels recognized it as an exemplary piece of propaganda.






But who was the real Mrs Miniver? The articles were produced by Joyce Maxtone Graham, who wrote under the name Jan Struther and seemed to resemble her heroine: She was upper-middle class, and lived in a gracious, comfortable home with her husband and three children. After the war broke out, she served as an unofficial ambassador from Great Britain to the U.S.






In truth, however, Jan Struther was not at all like the conventional Mrs Miniver. It wasn't merely that she didn't like tea--to the amazement of everyone in America--but her real life was neither simple nor saintly. Her marriage was ending, and she was secretly in love with a Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria.&nbsp;






Written by Jan Struther's granddaugther,&nbsp;The Real Mrs Miniver&nbsp;is a complex and fascinating biography. While the Hollywood version remains a powerful and inspirational movie, this book offers brilliant insights into the true impact of war upon real people's lives.






Ysenda Maxtone Graham&nbsp;is the granddaughter of Jan Struther, and had access to many personal recollections and family papers in her research for this biography. She lives in London.






One day my life will end; and lestSome whim should prompt you to review it,Let her who knows the subject bestTell you the shortest way to do it:Then say, "Here lies one doubly blest.Say, "She was happy." Say, "She knew it."







This excellent biography of Joyce Maxtone-Graham, better known to readers as "Mrs. Miniver" of World War II-era fame, is written by a granddaughter, Ysenda. Although she never knew her famous grandmother, Ysenda has captured the essence of this talented, complex woman whose writing captured the hearts of millions world wide.

"Mrs. Miniver" was, of course, an invention, an upper middle class English woman whose wisdom, fortitude, and compassion in the face of adversity personified what the British liked to think of as "our way of life." The extremely successful movie, produced by William Wyler and starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, is still rented, and shown on the classic movie stations.

Joyce Maxtone-Graham was very different from Mrs. Miniver: Part life-long tomboy, part buoyantly happy wife (in the early years of her marriage anyway), part sharp-eyed observer and part lazy and sensual mistress, Joyce is a complex character brought richly to life in this book. The genius of her writing lies in attention and enjoyment of small things: Her description of a happy union is "an eye to catch across the table."

Ysenda Maxtone-Graham is to be commended for her own attention to the small matters that make up a rich life, with its full texture of joys and sorrows. This excellent book will provide you with a full understand of "the real Mrs. Miniver." Five well-deserved stars!











This book rips the lid off the conventional pieties about what it emans to be an Englishwoman, and shows how Hollywood and the media can take a person's life and thoroughly rearrange it to a disorienting degree; it's an easy task, especially if the person in questions cooperates up to the hilt. In these days of reality TV, I often think back to this pioneering biography of Joyce Maxtone Graham, written by her grandddaughter with an eye nicely balanced between the too fond and the too cold. Today we see real people going on TV seemingly eager to give up all their identity just so long as they stay in the camera's eye. What Joyce did was something rarer, particularly for the 1930s and 1940s.






She started out life with a little girl's talent for drawing and writing little stories and poems. Marriage occupied her for awhile, and motherhood, but eventually nothing could hold her back, once she began writing the "Diary" of Mrs. Miniver, an imaginary Englishwoman whose life had roots in her own, but which was considerably idealized and romanticized. It started out small and then got big--too big to handle. Ysenda Maxtone-Graham, the biographer, gets considerable mileage out of the juxtaposition of Joyce's enormous personal ambition with the developing chaos in Europe which would lead to England's valiant defense against Hitler in the 1930s, and how the two combined to give England a new (and fictional) heroine, Mrs. Miniver, the character everyone thought was real!




Hollywood called, Joyce went, she sold an outlandish number of war bonds, but actually she was deserting her native land in time of need, driven mostly by an unseemly passion for a fellow anti-Fascist refugee. Love knows many avenues, of course, but reading the book you just can't help but think that her paramous was probably the worst thing ever to happen to her! However she would look on it differently, and that, perhaps, is the difference between living one's own life, no matter even if it's a muddle, and reading about it in the safety of your own library.



Ysenda Maxtone Graham tells this sad story with an easy flair and a sympathy for all concerned, especially those bamboozled by Joyce's prison of lies. I hope she continues to unearth more about her illustrious ancestor or, if the well is dry, to move on to another lonely soul.












I read a lot of memoirs, autobiograpies, and biographies. I'm not even sure why I bought this one.... I was never crazy about the Mrs. Miniver movie..... Maybe I am a sucker for GREAT book covers, and the profile of Jan Struther on this book is delightful!






The book is written by Jan Struther's granddaughter, and it is a JOY! I really, honestly am not sure why I bought it, other than I had just read Mrs. Miniver and I saw this at Amazon and thought this would shed more light on an interesting subject, that being England in the days before WWII. I thought I would probably just skim this book....... But I started it and loved it from the beginning. It is hard to believe this was written by a granddaughter, as I have found biographies by family members are almost always obviously opinionated, but this book is not opinionated at all. It is a delightful biography of a woman who seemed delightful herself, up until the last few years of her life, and even then for the most part she kept on smiling and trying her best to live the life she had.




I loved Jan Struther's poems, and the hymns are amazing! Who would have thought I would EVER be reading a biography of someone who wrote hymns, let alone hymns written by a humorist (for the most part) who claimed to have basicaly no religion. When I read her poem "Betsinda Dances" I had chills, and re-read it over and over because it is the epitome of the over-used word CHARMING. I also love little about-to-be-two-years-old girls and this gives a never-to-be-forgotten word picture of one dancing around her playroom.



Thank you to Ysenda Maxtone Graham for this charming, interesting book! Thanks also to the family for putting on the internet the rest of the poetry and prose of Jan Struther.










The film "Mrs Miniver", starring Greer Garson, was a wartime classic. It took America by storm and won five Oscars. It was a war film, though with a difference in that it was not the handsome RAF pilot but his bride who was killed. Even now it is a classic "weepie"; in 1942, even isolationist Americans were stunned. Winston Churchill said Mrs Miniver would do more for the Allied cause that a flotilla of battleships. The book "Mrs Miniver" had likewise been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and its author, Jan Struther found it hard to persuade people that she herself was not its heroine. "I felt like a ventriloquist", she later said, "whose dummy had struck up an independent conversation with the audience". In the book the Minivers were happily married, but in real life Jan had drifted out of love with her conventional husband Tony and had fallen for an erudite Jewish refugee in the flight to the United States. For the whole war this had to be concealed, while Tony was a prisoner-of-war and guilt drove Jan around America as an unofficial ambassador. Only in 1948 could she marry her refugee, and five years later she died prematurely. The way in which Jan Struther's life unfolded is a microcosm of what the war could do to people





Greer Garson...Mrs. Miniver
Walter Pidgeon...Clem Miniver
Teresa Wright...Carol Beldon
Dame May Whitty...Lady Beldon
Reginald Owen...Foley
Henry Travers...Mr. Ballard
Richard Ney...Vin Miniver
Henry Wilcoxon...Vicar









Sinopse

Apesar de não tão rica quanto nas publicações de Struther, a Sra. Miniver da versão cinematográfica ainda vive na confortável casa intitulada Starlings; não no centro de Londres&nbsp;mas num subúrbio perto do Tâmisa. A casa possui um amplo jardim com acesso ao rio e um barco a motor. O marido dela, Clem (apesar do sotaque do ator canadense&nbsp;Walter Pidgeon), é um arquiteto inglês bem-sucedido. Possuem vários empregados e um filho na universidade.

Com o início da segunda guerra mundial, Vin, o filho mais velho, regressa da universidade e se apaixona por Carol Beldon, neta de Lady Beldon, uma aristocrata de Beldon Hall, uma mansão vizinha. Apesar de discordâncias iniciais, se casam. Com a iminente ameaça de ataques aéreos à Inglaterra, Vin decide fazer sua parte e se junta à Força Aérea Real&nbsp;como piloto. É enviado para uma base localizada perto da casa dos pais. Clem ajuda na Operação Dínamo&nbsp;com o barco a motor da família. Sozinha em casa, a Sra. Miniver encontra um piloto alemão&nbsp;ferido em seu jardim. Ela o alimenta, o desarma calmamente e avisa às autoridades locais.

A Inglaterra começa a ser bombardeada diariamente e, enquanto Vin está na batalha com seu esquadrão, Carol é atingida e morta por um míssil. Os habitantes se refugiam numa danificada igreja local e, lá, determinam que irão lutar para defender o país e seu estilo de vida.

Agradecimentos:

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