Living life to the full

In 1971, Tove Jansson paid one of her many visits to London, where 1960s fashion hangovers made the whole city look like ‘one big fancy-dress ball’. When not partying to celebrate 20 years of British editions for her Moomin books, she and her life-partner ‘Tooti’ — the artist Tuulikki Pietilä — caught performances of Hair (‘a grand glorification of psychedelic hippiedom’) and the ‘racy’ Canterbury Tales musical. They also saw that ‘incredibly powerful’ film, The Trials of Oscar Wilde — ‘very unlikely to come to Finland, unfortunately’.

Foreign admirers sometimes presume that, in postwar Finland, Jansson found it easy to be both a saintly godmother of children’s literature and a (fairly) openly gay writer-artist. In fact, Lutheran conservatism meant that homosexuality remained illegal until that year: 1971. Cheerful, plucky, and free-spirited — the irrepressible Nordic mid-point between Joyce Grenfell and Frida Kahlo — Tove seldom dwells on the social risks she runs in these witty, shrewd and hugely entertaining letters.