DAISY MILLER

Daisy Miller

Daisy Miller

Introduction

Henry James's novella Daisy Miller (1878) ranks as his first notable success, achieving popularity even a notoriety surpassing anything he had written up to that point in his career. Its vogue helped to usher in the figure of the "American Girl" as a mainstay of national literature in the United States in the late nineteenth century. The story brings into sharp relief the contrast of European and American manners, around which most of James's future work revolves. The success of Daisy Miller further opened the door for the author to explore the ramifications of the "international theme" and to assert a kind of proprietary right to it. The tale solidly established a benchmark and a type for which James would always be remembered (Vaid, 1964, 61-102).

The author based the narrative of his infamous heroine who exhibits "an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence “upon a morsel of gossip he had picked up the year before from a friend in Rome. She told him about a young woman from home ("a child of nature and of freedom") who had managed to pick up a "good-looking Roman, of vague identity" but whose social career was speedily checked by others in the American expatriate community who disapproved of her apparently immoral behavior (James, Preface, p. 1269). It was all James needed. "Dramatize, dramatize!" he commanded himself, and the result was a minor masterpiece of social and psychological inquiry."A Great Hit"If plagiarism is the last refuge of an undergraduate scoundrel, literary piracy is the first resort of a publishing opportunist. Daisy Millerwas not the first work of James's to receive this dubious compliment (an unauthorized British edition of his 1877 novel The American right showed up in London book-stalls), but the unexpected appearance of this rather unassuming tale in (not one but) two American periodicals aroused much greater interest in an author who was then still relatively unknown beyond the modest subscription list of the Atlantic Monthly. For Henry James, Daisy Miller was the success de scandal that every writer secretly dreams of a work that transforms the author's name (or, at least, that of his title character) into a household word (Reeve, 1997, 74-166).

This outcome was surely not what James would have expected after the editor of Lippincott's swiftly returned his manuscript "with an absence of the comment" that struck the author at the time "as rather grim" a rejection that prompted him to give Daisy Miller instead to a British periodical (James, Preface, p. 1269). Without delay, Leslie Stephen published James's novella in two numbers of his magazine, the Cornhill (June and July 1878), and soon this story of an innocently forward girl from Schenectady was making reverberations on both sides of the Atlantic. From London, the writer told his family in America that, much to his satisfaction, the tale was showing every sign of having made "a great hit." "Everyone is talking about it," James boasted, "and it has been much noticed in the papers. Its success has encouraged me as regards the ...