Sophia Jansson – niece to beloved Moomins author Tove – recalls the lost summer idylls that helped shape her aunt’s bestselling book, now adapted into a film starring Glenn Close
Off the south coast of Finland, far from the suffocating heatwaves plaguing much of Europe, is a cluster of islands where the weather is changeable and it’s wise to pack a jumper. Sophia Jansson, niece of beloved Moomins author Tove Jansson, has just returned from the Jansson family island in the Finnish archipelago.
“Global warming is global cooling over where we are, so it’s been a really rainy and cool summer,” says Sophia, who has been summering in the archipelago ever since she was a child and is famously the inspiration for the six-year-old girl in Tove’s novel, spending her summer on a Finnish skerry with her grandmother and recently widowed father.
Still in print, The Summer Book is now a delicate, lovingly adapted film starring Glenn Close as the grandmother and Anders Danielsen Lie as the father, with newcomer Emily Matthews as a version of Sophia herself. Perfectly capturing the languorous pace of life on an island free from the trappings of the modern world, the film details three individuals at different stages of life coping with fresh grief in bracingly Nordic, show-don’t-tell style.
“I think [Tove] would have been proud to have a film of The Summer Book of this quality,” says Sophia. Shot on an island in the Gulf of Finland, the film is a faithful adaptation by American director Charlie McDowell, a Jansson fan whose own daughter is called Tove. “It’s such a relief for me that it was filmed in Finland, because of the light, the atmosphere and nature. When I see it, I think – yes, yes, yes, of course, that’s just how it was.”
Tove once said that the book was based in part on her own childhood, in part on her niece Sophia’s, and the rest in her imagination. It was written while Tove was mourning the death of her cherished mother, Ham, herself an artist. The Jansson family as a whole was artistic and very tight, with summers typically spent together on the island. “From the word go, when I was born, it was Tove, her partner, grandma, my father, and to begin with, my mum. That’s my family, and they were very close-knit,” Sophia remembers.
The Summer Book, one of her favourite books, is one she unsurprisingly reads “very subjectively”. Sophia was just 10 when it was published in 1972, four years after her own mother passed away and two after her grandmother died. Initially, at least, she never thought it strange that her aunt had written a book about a newly motherless girl called Sophia. “You know, I came from a family of artists, and they all used each other as inspiration and as help,” says Sophia. “So the fact that [Tove] would have used her own family or a familiar setting in one of her stories wasn’t odd. But I think as I grew up, of course, it got a bit blurred. Was I actually the Sophia in the book, or was this a fictionalised character?” Ultimately, she believes that “both are true”.
Yet the real value of the book, she thinks, lies in how Tove decided to craft it. A writer herself, with a memoir that is currently being translated into English, Sophia has always known how dedicated a writer her aunt was. The island, she says, was “where [Tove] found peace and freedom – freedom to work without interruption, to be by the sea that she loved, and be there with her partner.” Indeed, to live openly with a woman as Tove did, with her partner and artistic equal, Tuulikki Pietilä (Tooti), was a radical act at that time. The family island, and later the sparse outcrop on the outer archipelago where Tove and Tooti created their own summer home, provided inspiration but also much-needed privacy. “I think it was really where she longed to be most of the time.”
Super 8 footage of Tove shot by Tooti plays at the film’s end. Watching Tove navigate her island, or place a midsommar garland on her head, shows how faithful McDowell’s adaptation is to its source – both to the windswept natural environment, but also to the playful aunt that Sophia remembers. Tove, she says, “never treated me as a child. None of them did. I was always part of the group and never shunted to the side.” It’s something that she holds dear about her childhood, and it’s a quality that shines through in Tove’s books, too, which never talk down to children and yet still thrill with a child’s feel for magical thinking.
Now a grandmother, Sophia returns with her grandchildren to the archipelago she has been travelling to since she was a child. “It makes you feel part of a continuum,” she says, of running around the island with young children. “Because the book is about a little girl, it was just so serendipitous that my first grandchild was a girl.”
The Summer Book is out in UK cinemas from 7 August.