Daisy Miller

Daisy Miller is the famous 1878 novella by Henry James, first published serially in Cornhill Magazine and then issued separately as a small book the following year. It made James’s name with the broader reading public and has remained the most widely read of his shorter fictions across nearly a century and a half.

The central character is a young American woman traveling in Europe with her mother and younger brother. Frederick Winterbourne, an Americanised European who has lived in Geneva most of his life, meets her at a hotel in Vevey and is captivated by her freedom and lack of self consciousness. The acquaintance continues in Rome the following winter, where Daisy’s behaviour, particularly her habit of going unchaperoned to public places with an Italian friend named Giovanelli, scandalises the older Americans in the expatriate community. Winterbourne keeps trying to decide whether Daisy is innocent or improper, and the story works through his slow failure to read her clearly.

The novella is short, perhaps eighty pages in most editions, and is built around a central question that James deliberately refuses to answer. Daisy is either a genuinely innocent young American whose openness is being misunderstood by the rigid expatriate society around her, or she is genuinely indifferent to the moral conventions she keeps breaking, or she is something more complicated than either. James gives the reader enough information to ask the question but not enough to settle it, and the famous final scene in the Roman Colosseum at night, where Daisy catches the malaria that will kill her, leaves Winterbourne and the reader still trying to decide.

This is the book to start with for any reader new to Henry James. It is short, the plot is direct, and the central characters are easy to keep in mind. The novella is also a small masterpiece of the kind of ambiguous psychological writing that James would extend into the long late novels. It pairs naturally with An International Episode and Pandora, two other short pieces about Americans in Europe from the same period.