Heidi and Nine More Johanna Spyri Books, Free Online
Everyone has read Heidi and nobody has read the other nine, which is a shame in about three cases and entirely reasonable in the rest. Spyri wrote steadily for twenty years, almost always the same story — a child is taken away from the mountains and made ill by it, or is unhappy and is healed by being sent to them — and the variations are more interesting than that summary suggests.
Ten of her books are free to read in the library. Here is Heidi, then the three worth reading next, then the rest with an honest word about each.
Start here, obviously
- Heidi (1881) — an orphan is sent to a grandfather nobody in the village will speak to, on an alp above Maienfeld, and is happy for a year before being taken to Frankfurt as a companion for an invalid girl and beginning to sleepwalk from homesickness. The first half is one of the great descriptions of a child being well, and the reason the book has outlived its century is that Spyri understood something unusual for 1881: that Heidi is not made good by suffering, she is made ill by it, and the cure is going home. Read aloud from about five, alone from seven.
Two things modern readers notice. It is religious in a specific Protestant way — the grandmother's hymns and Heidi's learning to pray are load-bearing, not decoration. And Clara's recovery is a piece of nineteenth-century thinking about mountain air that will make a modern parent wince, particularly around a disabled child walking as a reward. Both are worth a sentence rather than a silence.
The three worth reading next
- Moni the Goat-Boy — short, and the closest thing to Heidi's first half in the whole shelf: a boy, his goats, a mountain, and a small moral crisis about a stolen cross. If a child finished Heidi and wants the feeling again in one evening, this is the answer.
- Rico and Wiseli — two linked stories, and the best written of the non-Heidi books. Rico is a half-Italian boy in a Swiss village who barely speaks and remembers a lake he cannot name; the pull of that half-remembered place is the whole story and Spyri handles it with real restraint. The Wiseli half is a quieter orphan story and slighter.
- Cornelli — a girl convinced she is ugly and unlovable, largely because two visiting cousins told her so, who withdraws behind her hair for most of the book. It is the least sentimental thing Spyri wrote and the one with the most recognisable child in it.
The rest, briefly
- Gritli's Children — a large-cast village novel, the sequel to a book the library does not have, and readable on its own. Pleasant and long.
- Maezli: A Story of the Swiss Valleys — a castle, a mystery about the family who own it, and the liveliest small child in the shelf. Better than its reputation.
- Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country — a scholarly uncle, a girl who needs country air, and a plot you can predict from the title. Charming and thin.
- Erick and Sally — an orphan taken in, a village, a reconciliation. The most formulaic of the ten.
- Veronica — the most adult of them: a village romance, a wrongly suspected young man, a good deal of Christian moralising. Not for a child.
- What Sami Sings with the Birds — very short, very sweet, birds, and almost no incident. Fine for a five-year-old and nothing to a ten-year-old.
Reading notes
On the sameness. Read two of these in a row and the machinery shows: a displaced child, an adult softened by them, mountain air as medicine, a hymn near the end. That is not a reason to avoid them, but it is a reason to space them out — one Spyri between other books works far better than a run of four.
On the translations. Everything here is translated from German, mostly by hands working around 1900, and the prose is plainer than Spyri's own. It reads slightly old-fashioned in English in a way it does not in German. This affects the minor books more than Heidi, which has had the best translators.
On order. There isn't one. Heidi has a sequel written by her translator rather than by Spyri, which is not in the library and is not much loss. Everything above stands alone, so read Heidi, then whichever description above appealed.
If it is the orphan plot you are after rather than the mountains, classic orphan stories free online covers the whole genre, books like Anne of Green Gables is the nearest neighbouring shelf, and the Switzerland collection collects the alpine books in one place. Everything of hers is on her author page.