You write well but last time you didn’t make a happy ending. Her short story “Messages,” published near the end of her life, is composed of snippets of letters she received: The work of being a public figure was neatly summed up, for her, in the never-ending burdens of correspondence. I’m feeling pretty cocky but also trying to maintain my image: gentle, cultivated, enraptured child of nature.” I’ve still got masses to sort out with family and cousins and children’s culture reps and translators and art galleries. . . . In 1963, she wrote home, from the midst of professional obligations in Stockholm, “I was woken by another TV crew wanting a comment on the cultural situation. . . . Jansson travelled frequently to conduct her duties as the ambassador of Moominvalley, mingling at parties where businessmen wore Moomin ties.

But most of Jansson’s fans arrived by way of the Moomins, a friendly species of her invention-rotund white creatures that look a little like upright hippos, and were the subject of nine best-selling books and a daily comic strip that ran for twenty years. Before her death, in 2001, at the age of eighty-six, Jansson produced paintings, novels, children’s books, magazine covers, political cartoons, greeting cards, librettos, and much more.

Tove Jansson had the status of a beloved cultural icon-adored by children, celebrated by adults. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, one of the most famous cartoonists in the world was a lesbian artist who lived on a remote island off the coast of Finland.

Tove jansson illustrations