Tove Jansson

I have been reading a book about Finnish author/illustrator Tove Jansson's work for the last couple of days. It is written by a man named W. Glyn Jones. (A Danish literary scholar of sorts according to the 'about the author' bit at the beginning of the book.) The Book as a whole is broken down into 16 Chapters, out of which the first one is about Tove directly, titled 'Background, Ideas, and Influences' the next 14 Chapters are all titles of Tove's Books (which the author first summarizes and then dissects and over analyses), and the last chapter, very cleverly titled ' Conclusion' serves, not surprisingly as somewhat of a conclusion.

At the beginning of the book is a short bit about my (possibly favorite author's) life and times and I realized, that I didn't know very much about her personal life at all. Then I did a bit more research and found this amazing site, which I hadn't come across before so far (I think it might be somewhat new) and was stunned by the amount of amazing photos of Jansson in her studio, her travels, and my favorite, ... of Tove Jansson on the island that she used to go to in the summer. It is so magical to see how the people you respect so much, lived, how they decorated their homes, how they dressed, how they passed their time when they were not writing and drawing... If you are looking for a thorough online story of her life I really recommend this site!

Also mentioned in this chapter is the fact that Jansson slowly moved away from writing for children after some time and started writing book for adults instead. Some of these books are 'The Summer Book', 'Sun City' and 'The Doll's House'. Here are the pages of the this first insightful chapter with highlighted parts of special interest to me for various reasons.