![]() ![]() ![]() And from Astrid Lindgren bounded fabulous Pippi Longstocking, the strongest girl in the world with her carrot-coloured pigtails and her freckles, her pet monkey, her mismatched stockings, her good-humoured disregard of authority, her spirit of misrule and joy. Tove Jansson beautifully gave us the mysterious outsider’s world of the Moomins. Richmal Crompton unleashed irrepressible Just William on to an unsuspecting conformist society. PL Travers created Mary Poppins, whose sour magic Disney tried to tame. These four women radically changed the landscape of children’s literature, making it wilder, stranger, more anarchic, and, crucially, more centred in the dreamy and unfettered imagination of the child. O nce upon a time, in the middle decades of the war-torn 20th century, there lived an Australian-born British theosophist and mystic, a respectable English woman hiding behind a man’s name, a gay and depressive Finnish Swede who lived half her life on a tiny island, and the firebrand daughter of a respectable Swedish farmer. ![]()
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