HEIDI

Johanna Spyri (1827 - 1901), was a prolific writer, but is today chiefly remembered as the creator of Heidi.

She was born Johanna Heusser, the daughter of the village doctor in Hirzel, just south of Zurich and was educated first at the village school and then in Zurich, after which she spent two years, 1844-5.

In 1852 she married an ambitious young lawyer, Johann Bernhard Spyri, and moved to Zurich. Her husband took a more and more active role in Zurich politics, eventually becoming the city recorder.

Her first story "A Leaf on Vrony's Grave" appeared anonymously in 1871, when she was already 43.

Encouraged by its success, she followed it up with several more tales, but it was only in 1878 that her first book for children appeared. The first Heidi novel - "Heidi's Apprenticeship Years" - came out in 1880. It was only in response to popular demand that she wrote the follow-up - "Heidi Uses what She Has Learned" - which was published the following year. The two together make up the novel now known simply as "Heidi."

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The orphan child Heidi first lives with her aunt Dete, but Dete would like to concentrate on her career. So she brings Heidi to her grandfather, a queer old man living in an alpine cottage far from the next village in German. Alm-Uncle is good-hearted but mistrusts anybody and wants to keep the child from all evils of the world. So he refuses to send Heidi to school; instead she goes to the pastures, together with Peter, a shepherd boy looking after the goats. This (all too harmonious) apine idyll finds a sudden end when aunt Dete comes in again and brings Heidi to Frankfurt (Germany) where she shall stay with Clara, the paralyzed daughter of a rich family, and learn something.

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