Heidi by Johanna Spyri: A Full Summary and Guide
What Heidi is about
Johanna Spyri published Heidi in two parts between 1880 and 1881, with the Gotha publishing house Friedrich Andreas Perthes. The original titles translate as Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning and Heidi: How She Used What She Learned. Spyri subtitled the work a book "for children and those who love children", which tells you a good deal about the tone. It is written for young readers, but it is not written only for them.
The story begins with a five-year-old orphan being walked up a mountain and left there. Heidi's aunt Dete has a job offer in town and no further use for a child, so she hands her over to a grandfather nobody in the valley wants to deal with. He lives alone on the alm above the village of Dorfli, near Maienfeld. The villagers call him the Alm-Uncle. He has a reputation built on rumour, including gambling away his share of the family estate and talk of a killing in a brawl, and he has not spoken kindly of God since his son and daughter-in-law died when Heidi was a year old.
What follows is the slow thaw of a hard man, told through the daily business of goats, cheese, hay beds and mountain weather. Heidi settles in quickly. She befriends Peter, the goatherd, his mother Brigitte and his blind grandmother, known throughout as Granny. The grandfather, resentful at first, is won over within days by her intelligence and complete lack of pretence.
The second movement of the book takes her away. When Heidi is eight, Dete returns and takes her to Frankfurt to be a companion to Klara Sesemann, a wealthy girl who cannot walk. Heidi is charming company and hopeless at city manners, which the household's strict housekeeper, Fraulein Rottenmeier, treats as a problem to be managed. Heidi grows homesick. The rest of the novel deals with what that homesickness does to her, and what she brings back to the mountain when she returns.
The main characters
Heidi herself is the engine of the book. She is cheerful, direct and unschooled, and her effect on other people is the plot. Spyri gives her very little inner torment and a great deal of warmth.
The Alm-Uncle is the more complicated creation. A man who has withdrawn from his community because that community judged him, he refuses even to let Heidi attend school, and holds out against the local pastor on the point. His bitterness is specific and earned rather than decorative.
Peter is the goatherd, a boy of limited patience and real jealousy. Granny, his blind grandmother, cannot read any more and depends on others for the hymns she loves. Klara Sesemann is kind, curious and confined, delighted by Heidi's descriptions of the alm. Her grandmother, Frau Sesemann, teaches Heidi to read and to pray, and gives her the book of Biblical stories that matters later. Fraulein Rottenmeier supplies the friction. Dete supplies the upheaval, twice.
The themes
Nature as medicine is the obvious one, and Spyri is unembarrassed about it. Mountain air, goat's milk and freedom to roam are treated as genuine cures, while the ordered comfort of a Frankfurt townhouse makes a healthy child ill. Heidi's sleepwalking, which the household first takes for a haunting, is the body's protest against the wrong place.
Family in the book is chosen rather than inherited. Heidi is passed from a dead mother to a grandmother to an aunt to a stranger, and the household that finally works is one assembled out of neighbours.
Faith runs through everything. Heidi learns to read and pray in Frankfurt, then takes both home. Reading hymns to Granny and the parable of the Prodigal Son to her grandfather are the quiet turning points of the second half, and the grandfather's reconciliation with God is also a reconciliation with the village.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. Heidi returns to the alm and her reading brings her grandfather back to prayer, to church and down to the village for the winter so she can finally go to school. Klara's doctor later recommends she visit, and a summer of mountain food and air makes her stronger. Peter, jealous of the friendship, pushes Klara's empty wheelchair down the mountain, then confesses. Without it, Klara has to try walking, and gradually succeeds. The Sesemanns and the doctor both promise to care for Heidi should her grandfather no longer be able to, and the book closes with Granny asking Heidi to read a psalm of thanksgiving.
Why it still matters
It is among the best-selling books ever written and one of the best-known works of Swiss literature. Part of that is the setting, which fixed an image of the Swiss Alps in the minds of readers who have never been. Part of it is structural. The book sets out a simple argument, that a child belongs where she can breathe, and then proves it twice over. It suits readers of roughly seven upwards, adults reading aloud, and anyone drawn to stories where kindness is treated as a force with real consequences.
