First published in book form in 1939, Mrs Miniver was an enormous success on both sides of the Atlantic and an Academy Award-winning hit of the silver screen. Churchill insisted that it had done more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships and Roosevelt claimed that it had hastened America's entry into the war.But Mrs Miniver first appeared in a newspaper column in The Times. A startlingly unsentimental view of the loss of England's innocence in the early days of the war, the column celebrated the everyday events - the sight of October chrysanthemums; the sense of doom when a favourite (but unreliable) car is replaced; children's capriciousness - that make life bittersweet.