Product Description

Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed. In Daisy Miller James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18667 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
Henry James was born in 1843 in Washington Place, New York, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father was a prominent theologian and philosopher and his elder brother, William, is also famous as a philosopher. He attended schools in New York and later in London, Paris and Geneva, entering the Law School at Harvard in 1862. In 1865 he began to contribute reviews and short stories to American journals. In 1875, after two prior visits to Europe, he settled for a year in Paris, where he met Flaubert, Turgenev and other literary figures. However, the next year he moved to London, where he became so popular in society that in the winter of 1878–9 he confessed to accepting 107 invitations. In 1898 he left London and went to live at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex. Henry James became a naturalized citizen in 1915, was awarded the Order of Merit and died in 1916. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first published being Roderick Hudson (1875). They include The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.

Customer Reviews

"I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do."
One of Henry James's earliest novellas, Daisy Miller (1878) follows the activities of a wealthy, and brashly confident, young American woman as she audaciously challenges European society in Vevey, Switzerland, and in Rome, having fun, doing what pleases her, and leaving staid European society gasping in her wake. Daisy Miller, whose father is in the US and whose mother is her ineffectual "chaperone," is a free spirit in a society bound by unstated but rigid "rules," determined to do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with whomever she chooses.

Frederick Winterbourne, an ex-patriot who has spent most of his life in Geneva, is attracted to Daisy, but his bonds with his stuffy aunt, Mrs. Cosgrove, and her friend, Mrs. Walker, both of whom govern ex-patriot society in Europe, leave him ill-equipped to deal with Daisy's flouting of society's conventions. When she is obviously attracted to Mr. Giovanelli, a singer/musician of no social standing, and when she is seen with him publicly in places that a "nice" girl would not grace at night, her reputation is threatened, and anyone associated with her is tainted. Winterbourne is uncertain how to protect her, while, not incidentally, protecting his own reputation.

Developing his most famous theme, James considers the conflicts between American and European values and the naivete of the Americans and their spontaneity as it contrasts with the old world formality of the Europeans. Daisy, who is often foolishly nave, is also seen as brash and ego-centric, a young woman whose destiny cannot be avoided (or even predicted) because of the strength of her own, often wrong, willfulness.

James focuses on two characters here--both Daisy and Winterbourne--and though the story is told from Winterbourne's point of view, Daisy is often the more vibrant of the two characters. Though she is shallow and assertive, he is hidebound by convention, leaving both characters with limits in terms of reader identification. When a night-time dalliance leads to serious consequences for Daisy, the reader is neither surprised nor shocked.

Filled with trenchant observations about Americans and their differences from Europeans, the novel incorporates significant symbols--the Coliseum (associated with innocent Christian martyrs), malaria (to which Americans are particularly susceptible), Randolph (Daisy's rude and undisciplined 10-year-old brother, the ugliest of Americans), and Mrs. Cosgrove and Mrs. Walker (converts to the European way of life). Carefully observed and critical of American naivete, Daisy Miller is the "preface" to Portrait of a Lady and many of James's more fully developed novels. Mary Whipple

Lawless passions
This story is extremely conventional.

Daisy Miller, its main character, shows 'reckless behaviour': 'Flirting with any man she could pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the time with the same partners; receiving visit at eleven o'clock at night. Her mother goes away when visitors come.'
For the American community in Europe, Daisy Miller is 'running absolutely wild'. Her behaviour is totally inadmissible and abnormal.
But, no problem, morality is saved. Daisy visits the Colosseum, a nest of malaria, with her Italian friend. She dies a week later, not without leaving a message that 'she would have reciprocated one's affection', that of a solid American, who 'had an old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism'. Death is a well-deserved punishment for a 'POOR girl'.

For Henry James, Daisy's mixture of 'audacity, puerility and innocence is inscrutable.'

This moralist story can be read in all school classes studying Victorian upper class conventions.