Freedom to roam in the high Swiss Alps brings great happiness in this story of Heidi and her unusual childhood high up in the Swiss Alps. When Heidi’s parents die, she is sent to live with her grandfather high up in the mountains. Everyone in the village is frightened of grandfather but Heidi soon gets used to his gruff ways and loves his simple way of life tending the goats. Summer and winter, Heidi helps her grandfather and plays outdoors, sometimes with Peter who herds his goats nearby. When interfering adults try to make changes, including taking Heidi away from her beloved home in the mountains, Heidi soon shows the restoring and healing powers of her special childhood.
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Written as a book 'for children and those who love children', Johanna Spyri's affectionate account of Swiss mountain life is one of the bestselling books ever written, and a joyous portrait of the innocence of childhood.
Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much-loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This edition of Heidi is translated by Marian Edwardes and features charming line-drawn illustrations, and an afterword by editor Marcus Clapham.
At the age of six, little orphan Heidi is sent to live with her grandfather in the Alps. Everyone in the village is afraid of him, but Heidi - fascinated by his long beard and bushy grey eyebrows - takes to him immediately and soon earns his love in return. She adores her life in the mountains, playing in the sunshine and growing up among the goats and birds, but one terrible day Heidi is collected by her aunt and forced to live with a new family in town. Heartbroken by the loss of her Alpine life, she must do everything she can to return to her grandfather.
Johanna Louise Heusser, the fourth of six children of Meta Schweizer (1797-1876) and Johan Jakob Heusser (1783-1859), physician, was born on 12 June 1827 in the village of Herzil, nestled in the Alps of Switzerland. She went to school and was tutored at home, then studied languages and piano in Zürich. In 1852 she married lawyer Bernhard Spyri (1821-1884) with whom she'd have a son, Bernard Diethelm (1855-1884). The couple moved to Zürich to a home overlooking the lake where she wrote her first novel, A Leaf on Vrony's Grave, which was published in 1871.