astrid lindgren the best of pippi longstocking

A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.Pippi intervenes when some bullying kids are beating up a little boy.

Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. From Judy Blume’s Sally J Freedman to Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracy Beaker and Andrea Beaty’s Rosie Revere, Engineer, their existence is thanks in no small part to Pippi and her pioneering pals. But fiction tells its own unique tales, and while there is always work to be done, a little rummaging through the stacks increasingly yields memorably liberated heroines to inspire young readers of all tastes. The strengths and achievements of real-life women who’ve shaped our world are something that girls and boys both should be reading and dreaming about. More gossip than sleuth, she ends the novel having been schooled in tact but otherwise triumphantly flawed and wholly unrepentant. Yet unlike so many classic heroines who came before her, she is not forced to repent. She’s the anti-Nancy Drew, scorning sweater sets and a desire to please for jeans and a tool belt. Harriet of Harriet the Spy fame – or should that be notoriety? – is snarky, spiteful and entitled. That’s what makes Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 heroine so interesting. And yet Pippi isn’t the only feminist icon hanging out in the fiction stacks – nor was she the first.īut true equality confers the right to be less than impressive, too. Remember that video the Rebel Girls team released? Headlined ‘If you have a daughter, you need to see this’, it vividly called out gender bias by showing a mother-daughter team removing from a shelf all the books that had no male characters (three) then all the books with no female characters (141), and finally those whose female characters were princesses, leaving the shelf almost bare. These days, children’s literature gets a bad rap when it comes to female characters. Since the first instalment of her adventures was published in 1945, Pippi has never been out of print, and remains internationally beloved.

Yet it’s Pippi for whom she is remembered. Lindgren went on to write many other books, screenplays and essays, regularly appearing in the media and ultimately becoming a global brand. She is also a loner and it’s hard to believe she’d have been quite the same had Lindgren’s early adulthood not been quite so tumultuous. Pippi is subversive and free-spirited, a true disruptor.

Astrid lindgren the best of pippi longstocking