Daisy Miller Summary: Henry James's Study of an American Girl Abroad
What Daisy Miller is about
Henry James published Daisy Miller, A Study in The Cornhill Magazine across June and July 1878, with a book edition following the next year. It is a short work about a courtship that never quite becomes one. An American girl travelling in Europe meets an American man who has spent years there, and the two of them fail to agree on what her behaviour means.
The story opens in Vevey, Switzerland, in the garden of a grand hotel. Frederick Winterbourne is supposedly there on a break from his studies, though a rumoured attachment to an older lady follows him around. He is introduced to Annie "Daisy" Miller by her nine year old brother Randolph, a boy convinced that their home town of Schenectady, New York, beats anything Europe can offer. Daisy feels the opposite. She is delighted by the continent and especially by the high society she hopes to enter.
Winterbourne is struck by her beauty and baffled by her manner. Within half an hour of meeting her he has invited her to visit the Château de Chillon, and she accepts, which is enough to scandalise his aunt. Two days later they make the trip. Winterbourne has paid the janitor for privacy, and Daisy is not especially impressed by the gesture. When he tells her he must leave for Geneva the next day she is openly disappointed, teases him about it, and asks him to call on her in Rome later in the year.
The second half moves to Rome, where the social temperature is far hotter. Winterbourne meets Daisy again in the parlour of Mrs Walker, an American expatriate whose standards have shifted to match those of Italian society. By those standards Daisy has already become a problem. She is spending time with a young Italian named Giovanelli, a man of questionable standing, and the American colony in Rome is talking. Daisy does not stop. Her mother appears not to notice anything is wrong at all.
The main characters
Daisy herself is the centre and the puzzle. She is beautiful, talkative, sociable and entirely unbothered by the disapproval she attracts. Whether she is innocent or reckless is the question the book keeps circling, and James gives his readers the same limited view of her that Winterbourne has.
Winterbourne is the lens. He is American by birth but Europeanised by years abroad, and he spends the novella trying to classify Daisy rather than simply know her. Early on he decides she is nothing more than a young flirt. He pursues her anyway.
Mrs Costello, Winterbourne's aunt, delivers the verdict of respectable expatriate opinion. She refuses to acknowledge any family that is as familiar with its courier, Eugenio, as the Millers are with theirs, and she thinks Daisy shameless for the Chillon outing. Mrs Walker plays the same role in Rome, and tries alongside Winterbourne to persuade Daisy to drop Giovanelli. Daisy refuses. Randolph, loud and patriotic, provides the comedy and a reminder of what the Millers are at home.
The themes
The first is identity across borders. Daisy behaves in Europe exactly as she might at home, and the American expatriates around her have adopted rules she never agreed to follow. The gap between those two codes is the entire engine of the story.
The second is class and social judgement. The Millers have money but not standing, and the expatriate set polices entry carefully. The business of how a family treats its courier is a tiny detail that carries enormous weight.
The third is freedom and the price of it. Daisy will not be managed. She rejects every attempt to steer her, and she pays for that refusal in reputation and in more.
Underneath all of it sits the question of moral judgement itself. The subtitle is "A Study", and the real subject is less Daisy than the way people look at her, Winterbourne above all.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the story fresh. One night Winterbourne walks through the Colosseum and sees a couple sitting at its centre. It is Daisy with Giovanelli. Furious, he demands to know how Giovanelli could bring her somewhere she risks catching "Roman fever", the local malaria. Daisy says she does not care. Winterbourne leaves them there. She falls ill and dies a few days later.
Why it still matters
The novella made James's name and remains his most widely read short work. It is brief, readable and sharply observed, and it set the pattern for the international theme that runs through much of his later fiction, the American abroad measured against an older society. It also works as an early study of how reputation is manufactured by gossip. Good for readers approaching James for the first time, and for anyone interested in how social rules become weapons.
More: More Henry James posters