Mrs Miniver

Book excerpt: “I can think of a hundred ways already in which the war has “brought us to our senses.” But it oughtn’t to need a war to make a nation paint its kerbstones white, carry rear-lamps on its bicycles, and give all its slum children a holiday in the country.” That’s just one sample of Mrs. Miniver’s homespun philosophy. Meet Mrs. Miniver. She is the universal, heart-warming symbol of the endurable and pleasant sides of existence. Against the shadow of the present she holds up to view the everyday domesticities, the comings and goings of family life, and finds them good. Mrs. Miniver at tea, Mrs. Miniver trying to discover what the windshield wiper is really saying, Mrs. Miniver and her three unpredictable children and her altogether too-predictable husband, Mrs. Miniver and the woman who said she could only accept the Really Nice Children as évacués—the writing and characters in these thumbnail sketches are disarmingly simple and recognizable, and yet, by the author’s gift of intense observation, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and important.