Jan Struther

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Standard Name: Struther, Jan
Birth Name: Joyce Anstruther
Married Name: Joyce Maxtone Graham
Pseudonym: Jan Struther
Pseudonym: Jan
Self-constructed Name: Jan Struther
JS began to write during the 1920s as a contributor of poems and sketches to journals. She also wrote some still-popular hymns, and edited and wrote for children. She hit the jackpot with her Mrs. Miniver series, designed just before the Second World War as a light spot in a newspaper, a representation of young and pleasure-loving femininity. Collected in a volume, reissued in the USA, and finally converted into an entirely different story in a Hollywood film, it achieved wide circulation and notoriety. JS never equalled this success with any subsequent work, though she was a public and private poet and a lively letter-writer until the end of her life.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Josephine Tey
Ralph Partridge , in the New Statesman and Nation, praised JT 's wonderful gift for portraying imposters, adding begrudgingly, I suppose that her vision of country life . . . . is also a...
Literary responses Elizabeth Taylor
With this novel reviews of ET 's work began to sound more and more patronising. The Times Literary Supplement likened her settings to the safe world of Jan Struther 's Mrs Miniver (a comparison already...
Literary responses Elizabeth Taylor
British Book News judged ET to be at the top of her form in these stories,
British Book News. British Council.
(1959): 215
but they were savaged by Walter Allen , who used a damaging comparison with Jan Struther 's...

Timeline

October 1939: Pianist Myra Hess began giving special wartime...

Building item

October 1939

Pianist Myra Hess began giving special wartime after-work concerts, starting at 5:30, at the National Gallery (from which the most precious pictures had already been removed as a precaution against destruction by bombs).
Maxtone Graham, Ysenda. The Real Mrs Miniver. John Murray, 2001.
120

Texts

Struther, Jan, and Aldren Watson. A Pocketful of Pebbles. Harcourt Brace, 1946.
Struther, Jan. Betsinda Dances. H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
Struther, Jan. “Hymns from Songs of Praise, 1931”. A Celebration of Women Writers, edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom.
Struther, Jan. Mrs. Miniver. Chatto and Windus, 1939.
Struther, Jan. Sycamore Square. Methuen, 1932.
Struther, Jan. The Glass Blower. Chatto and Windus, 1940.
Struther, Jan, and Ernest H. Shepard. The Modern Struwwelpeter. Methuen, 1936.
Struther, Jan. Try Anything Twice. Chatto and Windus, 1938.
Brown, Beatrice Curtis. Women of Britain. Editor Struther, Jan, Harcourt, Brace, 1941.