Heidi

Introduction by Eva Ibbotson

When I was seven years old I had to flee from Austria, where I was born, and seek refuge in England.

I was lucky — all my family escaped from Hitler — but I was terribly homesick. Until then we had spent summer in the freedom of the mountains, and now I was in a crowded and dirty part of London, shut in by high walls.

Then one day my grandmother took me to the public library, and there on the shelf was Heidi. I pounced on it: the picture on the cover was of a young girl sitting in a flower‐filled meadow, inside were illustrations of rampaging goats, a hawk circling the high peaks… I had read the book in German, now I had to learn English quickly so that I could read it again — and when I had done so I felt a wonderful sense of homecoming. It was all there, everything I yearned for and remembered: the rocky peaks turned to rose when the sun went down, the neat wooden houses, the brilliant stars. And the sound of the wind in the fir trees, which will follow Heidi in her dreams wherever life will take her.

But of course it is not only the landscape that makes Heidi so rewarding. The book tells a robust and splendid story. It may have been written more than a hundred years ago but it has everything you could want from a book: a heroine who knows how to take joy when she finds it, but can endure hardship bravely when, for a time, it comes her way; a most satisfactory ogre — her grandfather — who like all the best ogres has a heart of gold; a boy who, in spite of his oddities, becomes her friend. The middle part of the book contains the best description of homesickness I have ever read — and there are plenty of twists and surprises that propel the story forward to a happy ending, the kind of ending which doesn’t shut like a trap but allows you to go on dreaming and speculating and wondering.

When the book was first published it was an instant success. Girls everywhere were christened Heidi. The book has been filmed again and again, it has been adapted for television, and has given birth to numerous sequels — and no wonder, as children refuse to take leave of the characters they have learned to care about.

I don’t think this great success is at all surprising. Heidi is about something that all of us understand and value: the love that people bear for their particular corner of the world — a world made up of simple things: flowers and snow and wind; courage and friendship and thrift.

My family were not farmers or mountaineers: I have never in my life milked a goat or chopped wood to light my stove and I shudder to think what would happen if I tried to make cheese. But when I pick up Heidi to read it yet again, and travel with the heroine as she makes her first journey up the mountain, I know that I’ve come home.