Heidi’s Many Lives: The French and English Sequel Series to Johanna Spyri’s “Heidi”

Swiss author Johanna Spyri’s German-language novel “Heidi”, published in two parts in 1880 and 1881, has been recognised as a classic since its first publication. Its classic status can be understood using the concept of charisma, Terry Castle’s term for the collection of characteristics which provoke an emotional reaction in the reader, a desire not only to experience the work anew but also to experience more of the work and its world via sequels. Spyri’s vivid evocation of the cheerful and lively little girl protagonist, Heidi, her relationships with others and her experiences at home in the Swiss Alps and in Frankfurt are key to the novel’s charisma, alongside themes such as the freedom and beauty found in nature, its connection to God’s Creation and its power to heal spiritual and physical ailments. However, the last of these, exemplified best by Klara being miraculously cured of her disability, while inspiring to Spyri’s nineteenth-century audience, may rankle today’s readers. In addition, brief depictions of Indigenous/Aboriginal North American peoples and the Khoekhoe people of southern Africa are now recognised as racist. These details attest to the historical and cultural contingency of charisma as an analytical category.

“Heidi”’s charisma was such that several authors and publishers in French-speaking Switzerland and the US produced sequels that together create not just one but several life stories for Heidi. The French series (1934-1941), mostly the work of Charles Tritten with smaller contributions by Nathalie Gara and the pseudonymous Réa, takes Heidi from childhood through adolescence and an early career as a teacher, then into marriage and raising children and grandchildren as the winds of fate and history are brought to bear upon her Swiss family. Curiously, these novels combine original material with passages lifted from Spyri’s other works, which appear without attribution in adapted and translated form. This technique would later be adopted by Heidi’s English-language sequelisers as well.

Two of Tritten’s sequels, “Heidi jeune fille” (1936) and “Heidi et ses enfants” (1938), were charismatic enough in their own right to prompt “Heidi Grows Up” and “Heidi’s Children” (1938 and 1939), two books that present themselves as English-language versions of Tritten’s works. However, neither is a direct translation of the corresponding Tritten texts, with Margaret Sutton anonymously rewriting “Heidi Grows Up” and, bar a single page from Tritten, creating a whole new story in “Heidi’s Children”. Sutton later compiled six Spyri stories and some new material of her own invention to create “Heidi’s Friends” (1949, published 1965).

My examination of the aforementioned sequels will be focused through the lenses of four theories: Terry Castle’s concept of the charismatic text as a generator of sequels; Gérard Genette’s narratological understanding of the palimpsest as a symbolic literary form; Helge Nowak’s study of the production and reception of texts by authors and audience during the sequelisation process, and Mark J. P. Wolf’s ideas regarding imaginary worlds.

As a case study, the analysis of the French and English-language “Heidi” sequels shows how potentialities of characterisation and plot established in a single work can become manifest in a franchise, thereby generating authorial viewpoints and literary techniques which transcend the original author’s intentions. The “Heidi” sequels also illustrate the possibility of the creation of alternate timelines that, in turn, form alternate character biographies and life stories within a literary multiverse.