Johanna Spyri

Swiss author of novels, notably children's stories, best known for her book Heidi (1881), which she wrote in four weeks. Heidi, which has been translated into more than 50 languages, tells the story of an orphan girl who lives with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps, and is famous for its vivid portrayal of the landscape.

Spyri was the fourth of six children and second daughter born to the physician Johann Jakob Heusser and the poet Meta Heusser-Schweizer. Her older brother Jakob Christian Heusser was a geologist and mineralogist, her niece Emilie Kempin-Spyri was the first Swiss woman to obtain a doctorate in law.

Born in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, as a child Johanna she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the setting she later would use in her novels. Her books were originally written in German and translated into English at the end of the 1800s or the early 1900s.

In 1852, Johanna Heusser married Bernhard Spyri, a lawyer who was in Richard Wagner's closest circle of friends in Zurich. Her husband and her only child, both named Bernhard, both died in 1884. Alone, she devoted herself to charitable causes and wrote over fifty more stories before her death from cancer on 7 July 1901 at age 74 in Zürich.