By Category: Classics - Heidi BY JOHANNA SPYRI

Heidi is five when she is sent to live with her grandfather in his lonely hut high in the Alps. She quickly grows to love her carefree new life with him in the mountain air, and the old man comes to love her too. They are both unhappy when HEidi is sent away again,to a family in town, but she soon manages to get home to her Alps - and to share her happiness with her new friends.

Welcome to My Book Galerie - where I showcase my book kollection                                                  Category: Classics

JOHANNA SPYRI (1927 - 1901) was born Johanna Heusser in the village of Hirzel in Switzerland, overlooking the Lake of Zurich and with magnificent views of the Alps. Although she is one of the most famous children's writes in the world, little is known of her life. When she was asked to write her autobiography, she refused with the words: 'The external path of my life is quite simple, and there is nothing special to be mentioned. My inner life was full of storms, but who can describe it?'

Those storms can now only be guessed at. Her childhood appears to have been happy. Her father was the local doctor, and he and her mother made the house a centre of cultural activity. This is no doubt where Johanna, who was to become the author of almost fifty novels, acquired her love of books. She and her husband Bernard Spyri continued to move in the literary and artistic circles of Zurich, where Johanna lived after her marriage in 1852 and for the rest of her life.

Perhaps one storm was the untimely death of their only son in 1884, at the age twenty-nine; her husband also died shortly afterwards, unable to face life without his son. And it is known that Johanna sometimes donated the proceeds of her writing to charitable causes, so she must have felt others' pain almost as strongly as her own.

Heidi is often said to be her first book, but in fact she had written for both adults and children before. But the great fame of the book (whose original German title is Heidi's Years of Wandering and LEarning) has eclipsed all the rest of her literary output. It was translated into English within a very few years of its publication in 1880. Its huge and continued success is due to Heidi's encounters with the most basic and important issues of life - the individual versus society, wealth and poverty, sickness and health, God and humankind - as well as Johanna Spyri's gift as a lyrical and imaginative story-teller.

| Back to top | Home |

Index, 1, 2, 3

Welcome to My Book Galerie - where I showcase my book kollection                                                  Category: Classics