Jan Struther

Jan Struther was the pen name of Joyce Anstruther, later Joyce Maxtone Graham and finally Joyce Placzek (June 6, 1901 – July 20, 1953), an English writer remembered for her character Mrs. Miniver and a number of hymns, such as "Lord of All Hopefulness".

She was the daughter of Henry Torrens Anstruther and Eva Anstruther and spent her childhood in Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire, England.

In 1923 she married Anthony Maxtone Graham, a broker at Lloyd's of London, with whom she had three children. In the 1930s she started to write for Punch magazine, and this brought her to the attention of The Times newspaper, where Peter Fleming asked her to write a series of columns for the paper, about "an ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life – rather like yourself". The character she created, Mrs Miniver, proved a huge success, and the columns were subsequently published in book form in 1939.

On the outbreak of war, this book became the basis for a patriotic and sentimental film, Mrs Miniver, released in 1942, which won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

By this time, Struther had herself gone to America as a lecturer. In the 1940s she was a frequent guest panelist on the popular American radio quiz show Information Please, where she provided a warm and witty presence. She was one of the few women panelists to appear repeatedly on the program. An apocryphal story, attributed to fellow panelist Oscar Levant, tells that her appearances on the show stopped abruptly after she answered a question by referring to Agatha Christie's book Ten Little Niggers, which was the original British title of the book Ten Little Indians (later retitled And Then There Were None). However, the episode of Information Please in which Struther used the original Christie title in her answer to a listener question was in fact broadcast February 7, 1941, while the majority of Struther's appearances on the show (at least eight more occasions) occurred after this incident, through January 29, 1945.

...
Wikipedia