Heidi Beyond the Anime: Johanna Spyri's Alpine Novel of Homesickness, Faith and a Grandfather Won Back

The Heidi book differs from the famous 1974 anime mainly in tone and emphasis: Johanna Spyri's novel, published in two parts in 1880 and 1881, is a shorter and openly Christian story in which a five-year-old orphan softens her bitter grandfather, nearly falls ill from homesickness in Frankfurt, and brings him back to God and to the village. Isao Takahata's anime keeps that plot but stretches it over a whole television season, adds new characters such as the grandfather's St Bernard dog Joseph, and quietly swaps some of the religious material for fairy tales. Both tell the same core story about mountains, friendship and belonging, but the book is plainer, more moral and more about faith than many anime fans expect.

Johanna Spyri and the writing of Heidi

Johanna Spyri was born in 1827 in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zürich, and died in 1901. As a child she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the mountain region she later used as the setting of her stories. Her mother was the poet Meta Heusser-Schweizer. In 1852 she married a lawyer, Bernhard Spyri, and through him met figures such as the composer Richard Wagner, who was then living in Zürich as a political refugee.

Spyri began publishing only in her forties. Her first story, about a woman's life of domestic violence, appeared in 1873, and stories for adults and children followed. She is said to have written Heidi in just four weeks. The novel came out in two parts from the publisher Perthes in Gotha: Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning and Heidi: How She Used What She Learned. Its subtitle described it as a book "for children and those who love children". Her later life was marked by grief: her husband and her only son, both named Bernhard, died in 1884, after which she devoted herself to charity and wrote more than fifty further stories.

The story in brief

Heidi's real name is Adelheid. Her father Tobias was killed by a falling beam when she was a baby, and her mother died of fever soon after. She is raised for a few years by her aunt Dete, who then takes the five-year-old up the mountain above the village of Dörfli, near Maienfeld, and leaves her with her grandfather so that she can take a job. The old man, known as the Alm-Uncle, lives alone in a hut. He had served as a soldier in Naples, the villagers gossip about his past, and since the deaths of his son and daughter-in-law he has turned bitter against God and against people.

Heidi's curiosity and cheerful nature quickly win him over. She spends her days in the high pastures with Peter, the eleven-year-old goatherd, and visits Peter's blind grandmother, who comes to love her. Three years later, Dete returns and takes Heidi to Frankfurt to be a companion for Klara Sesemann, a rich, kind girl who cannot walk. Klara is delighted by Heidi's stories and mistakes, but the strict housekeeper, Fräulein Rottenmeier, keeps trying to tame her. Heidi's comfort is Klara's grandmother, who teaches her to read using a book of Bible stories.

Heidi's longing for the mountains becomes so strong that she starts sleepwalking, and the household thinks there is a ghost. The doctor recognises serious homesickness and orders her sent home. Back on the Alm, she reads hymns aloud to Peter's grandmother. One day she reads her grandfather the parable of the Prodigal Son; that night he prays for the first time in years, goes with her to church, and moves to the village for the winter so that she can attend school. The next summer Klara comes to visit and grows stronger on goat's milk and mountain air. Jealous Peter pushes her empty wheelchair down the slope, and without it Klara learns, step by step, to walk again. Peter later confesses, and Klara's family promise to look after Heidi if her grandfather can no longer do so.

The people on the mountain

Heidi is joyful and free-spirited; only Fräulein Rottenmeier insists on calling her "Adelheid". The grandfather is a cantankerous loner who becomes the most changed character in the book. Peter is sullen and pessimistic, and so fond of Heidi that he turns jealous. Klara Sesemann is twelve when eight-year-old Heidi arrives; her mother is dead and her father, a businessman, is often away. Her grandmother, Frau Sesemann, is warm and wise, while Rottenmeier stands for everything stiff about city life. Doctor Classen, a friend of the family, becomes the person who understands Heidi best in Frankfurt.

What the novel is about

Three ideas run through the book. The first is place: the Alps are not just scenery but a source of health and happiness, and Spyri is still admired for her vivid descriptions of the landscape. The second is homesickness. Heidi's illness in Frankfurt is one of the most realistic parts of the novel, showing how a child can be outwardly cared for and still be deeply unhappy.

The third idea is faith and forgiveness. Heidi learns to read through religious stories, uses that skill to comfort a blind old woman, and brings her grandfather back to church through a parable about a son who returns home. The structure echoes the parable itself: the girl, the grandfather and even Klara all have to go away from something and come back changed. Not every reader admires this simplicity. The book has been criticised for black-and-white characters and for an idealised picture of rural life.

There is also an old question about originality. In 2010 a Swiss scholar found an 1830 German story, Adelaide: The Girl from the Alps by Hermann Adam von Kamp, with many similarities in plot and imagery. Spyri's biographer said it was entirely possible she had known it, since she grew up in a house full of books. Whether or not she borrowed the outline, the emotional force of Heidi is her own.

How the 1974 anime changed Heidi

For many people in Japan, Europe and Latin America, Heidi means the anime Heidi, Girl of the Alps. It was directed by Isao Takahata, with Hayao Miyazaki working on scene design, layout and script, and Yōichi Kotabe on character design. To get the setting right, Takahata, Miyazaki and Kotabe made a research trip in the summer of 1973 to Maienfeld and later to Frankfurt, and their sketches shaped the backgrounds; Klara's house in the series was based on Goethe's house in Frankfurt.

The series adds and adjusts a great deal. The grandfather's big St Bernard, Joseph, was created for the show and does not appear in Spyri's book. A little goat named Yuki is based on a kid goat in the novel. Klara's grandmother helps Heidi learn to read through Grimms' fairy tales rather than the novel's Bible stories, which makes the anime less explicitly religious. Long episodes about daily life, a kitten smuggled into the Sesemann house, and Peter's winter sled race give the story a slower, gentler rhythm than the book. The result was hugely popular in Spain, where it ran from 1975, and in Germany, where a new theme song by Christian Bruhn became famous; in the English-speaking world, though, it was mostly known through a single compilation film.

Legacy and Heidiland

About 25 film and television versions have been made, including a 1937 Hollywood film starring Shirley Temple. A 1968 American TV movie became notorious when NBC cut away from the end of a football game to show it, and viewers missed a dramatic comeback; the match is still known as the "Heidi Game". Later "sequels" such as Heidi Grows Up were written by Spyri's French translator Charles Tritten long after her death, not by Spyri herself.

The book also shaped how the world imagines Switzerland. Since its first Japanese translation in 1906, it has strongly influenced the Japanese image of the country, and the area around Maienfeld is now marketed as "Heidiland", with one village renamed Heididorf. Spyri herself appeared on a Swiss stamp in 1951 and on a commemorative coin in 2009. If you already love the anime, reading the novel is a rewarding way to meet the quieter, more serious book underneath it.

Learn with Heidi: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to be homesick	to miss your home very much	Heidi was so homesick in Frankfurt that she walked in her sleep.
to win someone over	to make someone like or support you	She won her grumpy grandfather over in a few days.
a breath of fresh air	something new and pleasant	Heidi was a breath of fresh air in the quiet house.
to find your feet	to become confident in a new place	It took Heidi a while to find her feet in the city.
to take something for granted	not to value something you have	She never took the mountains for granted again.

Try this: Write three sentences about a time you were homesick, using "to find your feet" and "to take something for granted".