Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words: The Authorised Biography by Boel Westin, trans. by Silvester Mazzarella - book review: 'The rivers of blood that led to Moominvalley'

"All Moomintrolls go to sleep about November. This is a good idea, too, if you don't like the cold and the winter darkness." So the preface to Finn Family Moomintroll (1948) matter-of-factly tells us. Now, thanks to Boel Westin's biography of Tove Jansson, with its detailed analyses of its subject's distinguished work, we can view the joyous springtime experiences of these hippopotamus-like creatures in historical and personal terms. "It was the utterly hellish war years that made me, an artist, write fairy-tales," Jansson, born in 1914, confessed.

It was scarcely surprising that Jansson thought of herself an artist first. Her father, 'Faffan', a Finland-Swede and zealous Finnish nationalist, was a well-regarded sculptor; her mother, a Swedish Swede, was an illustrator and cartoonist. Jansson was intimately bound up with both parents, and also with her two brothers, the younger of whom, Lasse, would eventually take on the Moomin strip-cartoons. We can learn so much from Jansson's marvellous painting The Family (1942) – used as end-papers for this stunningly illustrated book – under Westin's well-informed guidance. At its centre, Jansson's stance speaks of indissoluble familial involvement, but reveals her need for cathartic release.

Such feelings were intensified by endurance of Finland's terrible Winter and Continuation Wars fought against the Soviet Union. Faffan was proud of his daughter, yet he became, as time and history advanced, uncongenial towards her. As a young man he fought against the Red Army – and his detestation of the Soviet Union led him to a pro-German position not excluding anti-Semitism.

Though Jansson stands now as Finland's most successful writer, her relationship to its majority language was for many years diffident. Small wonder, then, that she – though a provocative caricaturist and political activist of the Left – turned to an ineffably peaceful habitat of diverse coexisting beings, to Moominvalley, never as escape, rather as a desirable atavistic reality.

Increasingly, Jansson became troubled by her conviction, confirmed by observing Faffan, that war was indelibly the doing of males. Her erotic-emotional move from men to women can therefore appear an inevitability, though I doubt ideological explanation is sufficient.

Since her death in 2001, Jansson's reputation has arguably rested as strongly on pared, magical prose for adult readers as on her children's stories. But Westin shows that this division is inappropriate; Tove's unique imagination and art pervade both.