Mrs. Miniver Struther, Jan Modern Firsts,Signed & Association Copies

FIRST UK EDITION, SIGNED BY AUTHOR. 8vo. Quarter pink cloth, spine lettered in gilt in blue title panel, patterned paper boards. Top edge pink (faded), bottom untrimmed. Lean to spine, heavy knocks to bottom corners, especially bottom board. Edges foxed. Signed and dated (18.11.39) by Struther in blue ink to title page, endpapers and prelims foxed, occasional larger fox spots to margins, else, clean and tight. In supplied grey slip case, publisher's pink paper blurb and price label pasted to one side: split at top edge, rubbed and bruised, gently soiled. Good-only/ good-only A robust copy of the first edition of Struther's popular creation, "an ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life", collected from her Times columns and, unusually, signed in the year of publication. Peter Fleming commissioned Struther to write about an ordinary woman "rather like yourself," columns which were first collected as a book by Chatto and Windus, followed a year later by Harcourt Brace's American edition, with Struther undertaking a successful lecture tour. While the war features only glancingly in this collection – one chapter is titled 'Gas masks' – Mrs Miniver was famously transmuted by Hollywood into a patriotic 1942 Oscar-winning feature film.