Today, there is a museum dedicated to Tove Jansson’s original Moomin artworks in Tampere, Finland.
The most notable were her illustrations of the 1960s Swedish editions of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. Based on numerous conversations with Tove, and unprecedented access to her journals, letters and personal archives, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words offers a rare and privileged insight into the world of a writer whom Philip Pullman described, simply, as ‘a genius’. In addition to illustrating her own stories, Tove Jansson was commissioned to illustrate classic texts. In this meticulously researched, authorised biography, Boel Westin draws together the many threads of Jansson’s life: from the studies interrupted to help her family the bleak years of war and her emergence as an artist with a studio of her own to the years of Moomin-mania, and later novel writing. If her relationships with men were shaded by an ambivalence towards marriage, those with women came as a revelation, especially the love and companionship she found with her long-time partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, with whom she shared her solitary island of Klovharu.
Love and work was the motto she chose for herself and her approach to both was joyful and uncompromising. Tove Jansson’s work reflected the tenets of her life: her love of family (and special bond with her mother), of nature, and her insistence on freedom to pursue her art.
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