Heidi

About This Book

High above the Swiss village of Doerfli, at the top of a mountain where the wind never stops moving through three old fir trees, an old man lives entirely alone. The villagers call him Alm-Uncle. They tell stories about him, avoid him on the rare days he comes down, and agree on one thing: he is the last person on earth who should be trusted with a child. On a hot June morning, a young woman named Dete climbs that mountain path anyway, dragging behind her a five-year-old orphan bundled into far too many clothes. The child is Heidi, Alm-Uncle's granddaughter, and Dete has come to leave her there. What follows is not the disaster the village predicts. Heidi arrives with no fear of her grandfather, no interest in being a proper little girl, and an appetite for everything the mountain has to offer — goat's milk, hay beds, thunderstorms in the firs, and long days on the high pasture with Peter the goatherd and his flock. But Heidi's life on the Alm is not the whole of her story. Others have plans for her that will take her far from the mountain and test whether a person can be transplanted the way a seedling can. Johanna Spyri's novel, first published in the early 1880s, has stayed in print for well over a century in more than fifty languages. It is a short, fast-moving book with a deceptively simple surface: a happy child in a beautiful place. Underneath, it asks harder questions about what people owe to children, what loneliness does to a person over time, and whether the place you belong is something you choose or something that chooses you.

Heidi is one of those rare classics that is genuinely easy to read and genuinely worth arguing about. The plot moves quickly and the sentences are plain, which makes it a comfortable entry point into nineteenth-century literature — but the questions it raises are not simple ones, and middle school readers are exactly the right age for them. Heidi is a child with no power at all: adults decide where she lives, who she lives with, and whether her feelings count. Watching how she survives that, and how she changes the adults around her without ever setting out to, gives readers a lot to say about kindness, stubbornness, homesickness, and the difference between being cared for and being controlled. It is also a book that takes a child's inner life seriously at a time when most books for young people were mainly interested in lecturing them.

Pre-Reading Discussion Questions

1. The villagers in this story have decided what kind of person Alm-Uncle is before we ever meet him. How much of what you 'know' about a person usually comes from what other people have told you, and how reliable is that?
2. Heidi has no say in where she lives or who raises her. What are the hardest parts of having adults make every major decision about your life, and what can a young person actually control in that situation?
3. Think about a place where you feel completely like yourself. What specifically makes it that place — the people, the setting, the routine, the freedom — and could it be recreated somewhere else?
4. Is it possible for someone to be badly hurt by other people and become unkind because of it, while still being a good person underneath? How would you recognize the difference?
5. In the 1880s, many people believed that living in nature made a person healthier and better, while cities made them weaker and worse. Do you think there is truth in that idea, or is it mostly a romantic fantasy?
6. What does it mean to be truly educated? Is a person who can read and write automatically better prepared for life than someone who can't?

Themes & Big Ideas to Track

• The mountain and the city are set up as opposites throughout the novel — notice what each place gives its people and what each one takes away.
• Watch how Heidi changes the adults around her, and notice that she almost never does it on purpose or by arguing.
• Track homesickness as a real force in the book: Spyri treats missing a place as something that can genuinely damage a person, not as a childish complaint.
• Notice who counts as family here — several of the strongest bonds in the story are between people who are not related at all.
• Pay attention to how characters respond to being isolated, whether that isolation is chosen, forced by illness, or caused by a disability.
• Follow the idea of small kindnesses: many turning points in this book come from an ordinary, unspectacular act of generosity rather than a dramatic event.

Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide

About the Author

Johanna Spyri (1827-1901) was born Johanna Louise Heusser in the village of Hirzel, in the hills above Lake Zurich, Switzerland — the countryside that would later fill her fiction. Her father was a country doctor and her mother wrote poetry, and she grew up one of six children in a house where patients and visitors came and went constantly. She married Bernhard Spyri, a lawyer and city official in Zurich, and did not begin publishing until she was in her forties, when she wrote a story to raise money for families displaced by war; it appeared anonymously. Over the next three decades she produced roughly fifty stories and novels for children and adults, but Heidi — released in two parts in 1880 and 1881 — eclipsed everything else she wrote and became one of the best-selling books in the history of Swiss literature. Spyri was private about her own life and rarely gave interviews, and she died in Zurich in 1901.

Spyri wrote Heidi during a period when Europe was emptying its countryside into its cities. Factories and railways were pulling families out of villages and into crowded industrial centers like Frankfurt, and a great many nineteenth-century writers responded by treating mountains, farms, and open air as morally and physically healing — a Romantic idea that Spyri takes completely seriously. That belief had a medical dimension too: Switzerland's Alpine air was genuinely prescribed to patients in this era, and wealthy families traveled to Swiss resorts and sanatoriums for rest cures, which is part of why a Frankfurt household in this story would consider the Alps a plausible place to send a child. Heidi also sits at a turning point in children's literature. Most stories written for young readers at the time existed to deliver a moral lesson, and Spyri's book does include religious instruction and clear ideas about right behavior — but it also gives its heroine a real personality, real anger, and real grief, which was newer than it sounds. The novel's enormous international success helped fix an image of Switzerland — alpine meadows, goat bells, wooden huts — in the imagination of readers who had never been there.