Children's literature: Moomins" magic maker Tove Jansson: Work and Love. By Tuula Karjalainen. Translated by David McDuff. Penguin Global; 291 pages; $34. Particular Books; £20. TOVE JANSSON, who was born in 1914, wrote some wonderful adult fiction, but she is best known internationally for her Moominland stories and her illustrations for children. Jansson was often asked whom she wrote for. For herself, she would reply. But once she added: "If my stories are addressed to any particular kind of reader, then it's probably a Miffle." The Miffles were the lonely, timid ones, and their fear was important, she said. Anxious and self-confident children alike are unconsciously drawn to it, and to destruction. At first glance, this sits oddly with the easy-going charm of Moominland where, in spite of disasters and the Groke and the sinister Hattifatteners, civility and good humour always prevail. Tuula Karjalainen's "Tove Jansson: Work and Love," translated from the Finnish, radically shifts that perspective, at least for English-speakers who are unfamiliar with the origins of Jansson's stories. Jansson grew up in the shadow of the Russian revolution, which spilled over into bitter civil war in Finland in 1918. Her father fought on the anti-communist side, and one of her best adult stories describes her child-self watching him carousing with his old war comrades and, at a certain moment, ritualistically bayoneting a wicker chair. Many thousands died in that war, and although the anticommunists won, the country remained divided - increasingly so with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Jansson remembered feeling so enraged by her father's views that "she had to go to the bathroom and vomit." Three more wars followed, between 1939 and 1945: first the Finns fought against a Russian invasion; then they joined with Nazi Germany to fight the Russians; and finally they fought Nazi Germany itself. During the 1930s Jansson studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and became a passionate anti-Nazi pacifist. It was in 1934, while staying with an aunt in Germany, that she painted one of her first versions of a Moomin, a strangely menacing scene featuring a long-snouted creature, black and red-eyed. At the time she was also designing covers for a satirical magazine, Garm, in which she mercilessly caricatured both Hitler and Stalin. Again, small Moomin-like figures make an appearance, sometimes black, and sometimes as they appeared later, pale and plump. The war itself conjured the stories. "It was the winter of war, in 1939," she wrote. "It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures...I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with "Once upon a time."" Much later, left-wing Finnish critics would accuse Jansson of bourgeois escapism. But, in a sense, the very act of imagining was political, a gesture of defiance. The Moomins stood for something in a brutal world, though she would never quite have said so. Jansson always saw herself first as a serious painter. She exhibited frequently in Finland, and won awards and commissions for large public murals. Her reputation there as a writer lagged far behind the rest of the world. Ms Karjalainen is a historian of Finnish art, and although she covers Jansson's writing, it is the paintings that really interest her. This is a pity. Jansson was a more interesting writer than a painter, and her life sheds much light on her particular quality as a storyteller. Her use of Moomins to defy the war is characteristic. Everywhere in her fiction there is the same sense of deflection and indirection. She hated ideologies, messages, answers. And it somehow fits that she fell in love with both men and women. Ambivalence was a kind of comfort to her. As one of her characters says, "Everything is very uncertain, and that is what makes me calm."