وصف الكتاب | A charming nineteenth-century Swiss classic about home, family and friendship. At the age of five, little orphan Heidi is sent to live with her grandfather in the Alps. Everyone in the village is afraid of him, but Heidi is fascinated by his long beard and bushy grey eyebrows. She loves her life in the mountains, playing in the sunshine, and growing up amongst the goats and birds. But one terrible day, Heidi is collected by her aunt and made to live with a new family in town. Heidi cant bear to be away from her grandfather. Can she find a way back up the mountain, where she belongs? |
عن المؤلف | Johanna Spyri (1827-1901). Celebrated childrens writer, best remembered for Heidi, a happy tale of a young girls life in the Swiss mountains. Johanna Heusser was born in Hirzel, a village near Zurich, Switzerland, in 1829. She was one of six children, whose father was a country doctor. When she was a little girl, Johanna lived a healthy, outdoor life at her home overlooking the stunning, flower-decked mountain slopes and the shimmering Lake Zurich. She helped to tend the goats and sometimes helped her father tend special patients, whom he brought home for particular care. In 1852 she married Bernhard Spyri, a young lawyer, who eventually became town clerk of Zurich, which was where they established their new life together. The couple moved within artistic and literary circles, but the reason Johanna began writing was to earn money with which to help the wounded refugees returning from the Franco-Prussian war. She began to sell childrens stories, and then in 1880 her first full-length story, Heidi, was published. An instant success, the book ran through thirteen editions in its first decade. In 1884 it was translated into English, appealing greatly to readers in both Britain and America. The story tells of a little Swiss girl living with her grandfather in the idyllic atmosphere of the Swiss Alps, and seems to have been drawn much from Johannas own experience. Heidi has been translated and illustrated by numerous different people since its initial publication, most famously by Charles Tritten, who also wrote two popular sequels, Heidi Grows Up and Heidis Children. Little else is known of Johanna Spyris life. When once asked to write an autobiography she refused, saying The external path of my life is quite simple, and there is nothing special to be mentioned. My inner life was full of storms, but who can describe it? |