Karin Nyman tells Richard Orange of her hopes that a new film and musical will lead another generation of readers to her mother’s subversive heroineShe heaves a circus strongman above her head and tosses policemen into bushes, vanquishes hapless burglars and wrongfoots the uptight, bourgeois woman who wants her put into a children’s home.
Yet Pippi Longstocking, the girl with the freckles and protruding pigtails, has not yet won a place on every British child’s bedside table.When the first book was published, two months after the end of the second world war, the reason was obvious, believes Karin Nyman, daughter of the character’s creator, Astrid Lindgren.
“A country which has got Alice in Wonderland, and which has got Winnie the Pooh, and other stories, they didn’t need Pippi Longstocking,” she says.
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