'It was lovely, thought Mrs Miniver, nodding goodbye 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 . . ." Thus, unheralded and unannounced, did a modest little bi-weekly column slip on to the court page of the Times on Wednesday October 6th, 1937. Its cheerful heroine, her easy-going husband and their three immaculately mannered children Vin, Judy and Toby elevated middle-class contentment to a high art. Mrs Miniver could be relied on to come up with pithy observations on urban family life which, while ostensibly critical of the assumptions of her social peers and even - perhaps especially - of her social betters, actually celebrated the serene prosperity of pre-war middle England to an unprecedented degree.
"Really, it was lamentable, the unevenness of most married couples. Like those gramophone records with a superb tune on one side and a negligible fill-up on the other which you had to take whether you wanted it or not." To a cynical 21st-century eye this luminous portayal of an endless round of shooting-parties, concerts, summers in Scotland and crumpets for tea is sleek to the point of smugness. But it captured the imagination of Times readers to such an extent that the column's author, Jan Struther, was soon universally dubbed "the real Mrs Miniver"; an impression enhanced when the articles were published in book form in 1939.
The truth, of course, was considerably less pure, and far from simple; as Struther's grand-daughter, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, found out when she set out to research her affectionate, beautifully written biography called - what else? - The Real Mrs Miniver. In her introduction, she contrasts the kind of elderly grandmother Mrs Miniver might have become, ensconced in "a chintzy, scented haven of pot-pourri and lilies, with pink-and-white striped sofas and silver-framed photographs of her deceased husband in a kilt" with an 80-year-old Struther living in an untidy apartment in Manhattan, strewn with "open reference books and wood shavings and long-playing records not put back into their sleeves". Unlike her relentlessly ladylike creation, Struther was a lifelong tomboy. A passionate carpenter, she was also a keen shot who liked to describe blood sports as "indefensible but irresistible".
Above all, Struther was a talented and prolific writer, mistress of the amusing miniature. Her poems for Punch magazine were illustrated by the Winnie-the-Pooh man Ernest Shepard, adding to their air of A.A. Milne-ish ingenuity.
Though she was happily agnostic, she wrote a clutch of Anglican hymns when commissioned to do so by Canon Percy Dearmer of Westminster Abbey. But then she could also turn her hand to a cigarette advertisement: "Better buy Capstan - they're blended better". She could also write wittily about the act of writing itself. "I have often wondered," Maxtone Graham quotes from one of her essays for the Spectator, "whether mildness (which is by no means the same thing as humility) would ever have gained such prestige as a Christian virtue if the hymn-writers had not been at their wits' end for a rhyme to 'child'." In 1936, Struther received a letter from a friend who was a leader-writer at the Times. "Dear Jan," it read, "If you ever read the articles on the Court Page of the Times, you will have noticed that they are mostly about stoats. This seems to me a bad thing . . ." Adding that the paper would welcome "a light and feminine touch ocasionally", he invited her to have a go at turning out "the simple and rather dim kind of stuff that is necessary" - something about "an ordinary woman, who leads an ordinary kind of life. Rather like yourself".
Whatever about ordinary, in real life Struther was married to the eldest son of a Scottish laird-to-be, Tony Maxtone Graham. Like the Minivers, they had three children; Jamie, Janet and Robert. There, however, the resemblance ended. In her "Mrs Miniver" column, Struther created a vision of a cloudless marriage - but, as Maxtone Graham puts it, "the paradise she depicted was for her a paradise lost". The initial bliss of married life chez the Maxtone Grahams had given way to sullen silences and separate bedrooms. Tony, who worked for an insurance broker, "came home at six and played with his model trains". Worse, he took up golf and became a car bore.
But if her husband was growing daily more unlike the suave, sexy Clem Miniver, there are strong hints in her grand-daughter's book that Struther, for her part, might not have been the epitome of Caroline Miniver calm. A friend who accompanied the couple on an extended shooting holiday in the Danube marshes of Romania noted in her diary that on the train journey Jan, "swathed in innumerable leather and fur coats etc", was "at her very worst - the child-wife business - fussing over her food and changing places because the light was in her eyes, and being kittenish and taking up all the room and then refusing offers of help . . ." Even the relentlessly serene Mrs Miniver couldn't fail to notice the gathering storm-clouds over England and Germany. When the war finally began Struther, with her usual manic energy, hurled herself into good works, helping to sort clothes at a charity clothing depot and often lingering to chat with the Jewish refugees, many of whom were musicians and artists. But when she asked a friend to recommend someone who might help her improve her German, she got more than she bargained for; the lanky Viennese art historian whose telephone number she was given turned out to be the love of Struther's life. But Adolf Placzek had already applied for a visa to the US, and he soon sailed for New York from Liverpool, leaving a heartbroken Struther behind.
Help was at hand, however, and from an unlikely source. In June 1940, the head of the American Division of the Ministry of Information summoned Struther to a meeting in Whitehall: would she be prepared to undertake a lecture tour of the US, representing Mrs Miniver? If the isolationist Americans heard the viewpoint of a typical British wife and mother, it might help turn the tide of opinion in favour of entering the war. Struther agreed with alacrity, planning not just to link up with her beloved Dolf but to spirit her children to the safety of New York.
The tour was wildly successful. Struther's spirited personality came as a pleasant surprise to the Americans, who had been expecting something much more twinset and pearls; and in the midst of it all, MGM bought the rights to Mrs Miniver and set about making an anti-war weepie starring Greer Garson. The film, too, was a success (despite catty reviews from across the Atlantic: "No gents' outfitters of our acquaintance supplied Mr Miniver with his pyjamas," observed the Observer) and Winston Churchill, a famous weeper during the sniffly bits of films, predicted that its contribution to defeating the Axis powers would be more powerful than a flotilla of battleships.
It is one of the earliest recorded examples of the phenomenon we now call hype, but if it made Struther a wealthy woman it also, arguably, ruined her life: for how could a "typical British wife and mother" admit to being in love with a penniless Viennese refugee? The affair with Dolf had to be kept secret for almost a decade; by the time they did marry in March 1948, Struther was already suffering from manic depression, and she died just five years later, of a brain tumour, at the age of 52.
Maxtone Graham was never to know an elderly grandmother - of any description.
Mrs Miniver, by Jan Struther, is published by Virago Modern Classics at £7.99 in UK
The Real Mrs Miniver, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, is published by John Murray at £17.99 in UK