Her name derives from the Swedish slang mymla, meaning to make love, and Jansson’s circle delightfully used ‘mymble’ to refer to a lover of either sex. Both Mymble and Little My are the offspring of the older Mymble, a gloriously polyamorous character who lives for pleasure and to procreate. A riot of colour, shape and form, it is heavily influenced by Matisse and a work of art in its own right. Joy is further evident in The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My. Ultimately the affair was to prove short lived but the couple remained lifelong friends.
Her characters are granted happy endings but all the same, “they’re quite exceptional for children’s books at that time,” says Westin. The Moomins and The Great Flood contains images of refugees searching for their relatives while Comet in Moominland, completed just after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sees the residents of Moominvalley facing possible annihilation from a comet hurtling towards earth.
Not that this alternative was any less bleak. “She had to create alternatives to the world she was living in,” says Jansson biographer Boel Westin. It was the horrors of that time that also served as inspiration for the first Moomin books. If the war had ended differently the consequences for her would have been fatal. Her courage in challenging public opinion cannot be underestimated. As Finland had entered into an alliance with Germany in 1940, her work caused consternation among the authorities and the magazine came perilously close to being charged with insulting the head of a friendly state. Her cartoons reveal a pathetic and ridiculous clown behind the monster who threatened Europe. She had been mocking Hitler in the pages of Garm since as early 1935 but the war heightened her satirical bite. The war years were traumatic for Jansson but also provided a great stimulus to create.
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