A young girl is sent to live with her gruff, solitary grandfather high in the Swiss Alps, and the mountain air and goat pastures win him round as much as her. Johanna Spyri wrote it from a landscape she knew intimately, and that specificity, the cheese toasted by the fire, the hay-loft bed under the stars, gives the reading aloud something to see. Good for a child old enough to sit with a full chapter.
About this book
Published in two parts, 1880 and 1881 · One of the best-selling books ever written · Translated into more than forty languages
Johanna Spyri was a Zurich housewife who began writing only in middle age. Heidi appeared in two parts, the first in 1880 and the second in 1881. It follows an orphan sent to live with her gruff grandfather in a hut high in the Swiss Alps above Maienfeld, then taken down to the city of Frankfurt, where she grows so homesick for the mountains that she begins to waste away.
It became one of the best-selling books ever written and one of the best-known works of Swiss literature, translated into more than forty languages and sold in the tens of millions. It has been filmed and serialised many times over, including a Japanese animated series in 1974 that carried the mountain girl to a new audience. The region it describes now draws visitors as "Heidiland".
The copy on this shelf is the full original story, translated from Spyri's German.
Chapters
A long one: read it a chapter a night.
- Introduction
- Heidi's First Mountain Climb
- A New Home with Grandfather
- Little Bear and Little Swan
- Shooting Down the Mountain Side
- A Railroad Journey
- Chapter VI
- The Unfriendly Housekeeper
- Surprises for the Children
- Chapter IX
- Clara's Lovable Grandmother
- Home-Sickness
- Chapter XII
- At Home Again on the Mountain
- The Coat with the Silver Buttons
- A Great Disappointment
- The Doctor Comes with Presents
- Excursions Over the Mountains
- A New Home for the Winter
- Heidi Teaches Obstinate Peter
- A Strange Looking Procession
- Happy Days for the Little Visitor
- Wicked Peter and the Unlucky Chair
- Good-Bye to the Beautiful Mountain
Public domain. Source text via Project Gutenberg, PG boilerplate removed. View the source edition