Anti-lush, sculpted by the elements rather than softly shaped by a human hand. There is some relish in these extremes: Jansson loved a storm and her island aesthetic is distinctive. They include visions that now read like warnings of climate change: “the great gap that had been the sea in front of them, the dark red sky overhead, and behind, the forest panting in the heat”. They speak (but never obviously) of characters resonating to the winds and seas around them. For all the light clarity of the prose – which is comic, benign and quizzical – these books show places gripped by ferocious forces, laid waste by storms and floods and snows.

Yet her main Moomin adventures are startlingly catastrophic. She has wonderful passages in which entire landscapes are made by peering at blades of grass and scraps of bark. Not least in her crystalline descriptions of the natural world.Ī painting by Tove Jansson for The Summer Book, a story about a family’s stay on a tiny Finnish island.

She was brought up in Finland speaking Swedish, had male and female lovers, told her stories in pictures and in prose, lived on water as well as land. Success may also have obscured how ambivalent she was, how often on the cusp of identities. Their marketing triumph – in which Jansson enthusiastically participated – has overshadowed her other achievements as a painter, novelist, short-story writer, anti-Nazi cartoonist, and designer of magazine covers. The tales of amiable troll creatures have been taken to generations of hippy hearts their pear-shaped faces have adorned a million ties. Her illustrated Moomin books, which began to be published just after the second world war, brought her phenomenal acclaim and devotion.

Klovharun encapsulates something of Jansson’s originality as an artist and writer – and her human presence. The island meant “privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences”. For 18 years she and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent long summers there, heading out from Helsinki as soon as the ice broke in April, leaving only in early October.

It has scarcely any foliage, no running water and no electricity. Klovharun in the Finnish archipelago is tiny – some 6,000 sq metres – and isolated, “a rock in the middle of nowhere”, according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia. I n 1964, when she was in her 50s, the Moomin creator Tove Jansson settled on her dream island.

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