Pippi Longstocking is a nine-year-old girl who lives alone with a monkey and horse in a cottage called Villa Villekulla at the edge of a village close to the sea in an unnamed part of Sweden. She is a tender-hearted braggart, brilliant but unlettered, with a punning, pulling-the-rug wit. She lives as she likes — sleeping with her shoes on the pillow is something children always remember about Pippi, along with the carrot-coloured plaits at right ankles to her freckled face and her superhuman strength.
Pippi burst upon the world in 1945 and her main adventures were over by 1950 — a few later books elaborated on scenes already laid down. Her creator was a previously unknown writer of occasional magazine stories who had been born into a farming community in southern Sweden and moved to Stockholm in her teens. She had worked as a secretary before marrying in 1931 and settling down to a life as a stay-at-home wife and mother. During the war she had gone back to work — in the censorship department of neutral Sweden’s central post office. The first Pippi stories were written to amuse her nine-year-old daughter when she was bedridden with a sprained ankle.
The immediate success of Pippi Longstocking — first in Sweden then Denmark then the rest of the world — set Astrid Lindgren on a path to becoming one of the best known figures in Swedish cultural life. In 1948 she joined the permanent panel of 20 Questions, the country’s most popular radio programme, and was soon being canvassed for her opinion on everything from child-rearing to world peace (she reckoned they were connected).
But mainly she continued to write children’s books and they continued to be phenomenally successful, despite frequent changes of genre.
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