It was not until she was 53 that she wrote her signature book Heidi. Here she started to write about the countryside she had left behind, her first story A Leaf of Vrony’s Grave appearing anonymously in 1871 followed by a series of short stories. She was sometimes celebrated as a feminist icon, which is questionable since she opposed women’s access to university studies, and had a rather conservative mindset, as her numerous books about girls’ education and domestic life prove.“I would rather be with my grandfather on Alp than anywhere on earth.”īorn in Hirzel, a rural village in Switzerland, Johanna Heusser married Johann Spryri when she was 25 and moved to Zurich. The museum gives astonishing insights into the historical and social context of Spyri’s work, her family life, the reception of her books, and the myths that arose around her person. The book was translated into more than 50 languages and became a successful global bestseller.
When Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning was first published in 1879, Spyri became famous in only a few weeks. She started her writing career when she relocated to the center of Zurich after her marriage in 1852. The building in which the museum is located formerly served as the village’s public school house, which also Spyri attended. Spyri was born in 1827 in Hirzel, a village about 20 miles south of Zurich. It was exactly this context that inspired Spyri, and many other representatives of Romantic literature, to gloss over the social problems of the time with stories of a peaceful rural life. As author Johanna Spyri described it, the city itself turned into a giant, noisy construction site. Whole city quarters (mostly slums) turned into factory plants, and there was a mass migration of poor farmers seeking jobs as factory workers. Rapid industrialization turned the city upside down. But as this small museum details, the rustic story actually masks the societal issues caused by rapid 19th-century urbanization and industrialization.ĭuring the 1850s and 1860s, Zurich faced a radical change.
As one of the bestselling children’s books of all times, and through various successful movie and cartoon adaptations, “Heidi” tells the tale of an idyllic, ahistorical rural life filled with beautiful mountains, goats, and harmony.
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