Placzek, Joyce (author, née Anstruther, then Maxtone Graham, also known as Jan Struther.)
Dates
- Existence: 1901-1953. - 1953
Biography
Joyce Anstruther Placzek, writing as ‘Jan Struther’, is best known for creating ‘Mrs Miniver’, the character who - particularly as played by Greer Garson in the 1942 Hollywood film - did so much to swing public opinion in the USA towards joining the Allied war effort. The London-born daughter of Henry Torrens Anstruther, a Scottish Liberal MP, Joyce Anstruther married into the Maxtone Grahams, a Perthshire landowning family. She led a privileged if occasionally impecunious life, making a fairly regular income from articles and poems published in newspapers and magazines.
`Mrs Miniver` first appeared as a fortnightly character in `The Times`, and the articles were collected and published under the eponymous title in 1939. On the back of the book’s American success, Joyce Maxtone Graham travelled to the USA in 1940 to undertake lecture tours promoting British-American relations, but also to meet up again with Dolf Placzek, a Viennese refugee with whom she had begun an affair in London before the war.
In the USA, Jan Struther appeared regularly on radio shows and on the lecture tour circuit. She was a keen supporter of the Democratic Party.