Mrs. Miniver (character) President Franklin D. Roosevelt credited it for hastening America's involvement in the war. Winston Churchill is said to have claimed that it had done more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships. Churchill is further quoted by Bernard Wasserstein in his book, "Barbarism and Civilization," as saying that the book (and later the film) was worth "six divisions of war effort." In 1942, when the film came out, Roosevelt ordered it rushed to theaters. The film adaptation of "Mrs. Miniver" was produced by MGM in 1942 with Greer Garson in the leading role and William Wyler directing. Under
Mrs. Bridge The Believer, called "Mrs. Bridge" one of Connell's "three classics of Wasp repression" (the other two being the novels "Mr. Bridge" and "The Connoisseur"). American novelist James Patterson, who said "Mrs. Bridge" was the one novel that probably influenced him the most (Joshua Ferris is another admirer), said it and "Mr. Bridge" "capture the sadness, and boredom, of the unexamined life" and praises the compassion and precision of Connell's writing. British critic Matthew Dennison (who praised the "studiedly simple, undecorated prose, with few rhetorical flourishes") compared the main character to Jan Struther's Mrs. Miniver; both inhabit "an interwar world shaped