Daisy Miller (Modern Library Classics) Read online

  2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Introduction copyright © 2002 by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Biographical note copyright © 2001 by Random House, Inc.

  Notes and reading group guide copyright © 2002 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  James, Henry, 1843–1916.

  Daisy Miller / Henry James ; introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick ; notes by James Danly.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-232-2

  1. Americans—Europe—Fiction. 2. Young women—Fiction. 3. Europe—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS2116 .D3 2002

  813′.4—dc21

  2001044626

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  INTRODUCTION by Elizabeth Hardwick

  PREFACE TO THE NEW YORK EDITION

  DAISY MILLER

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  NOTES

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  INTRODUCTION

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Daisy Miller, “a Study,” as James calls it, of a young American girl touring Europe for the first time, was an immediate success when it appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, a British publication, in 1878. The short novel had been rejected for American publication on the grounds that Daisy was not a proper representation of her country or of American girlhood. That was an editorial mistake, of which literary history contains more than one. The interesting thing about this American girl is that she is naively just herself—she acts, talks, and responds without guile or calculation. As a symbolic representation of her country, if that is what James intended, her claim is a shadowy, very original twist indeed. It is her antagonists, Americans all, who offer themselves as the vessels of national and social standards. The landscape is Europe, the important characters are Americans, and the drama is not quite the international confrontation for which the fiction of Henry James is noted. Instead it may be read as an intramural battle between middle-aged, deracinated American women long abroad and a young, provincial American girl whose naturalness and friendliness are more suitable to hometown streets than to the mysteries of European society.

  Daisy is from Schenectady in upstate New York; she is first met in the resort town of Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. She is traveling with her bratty but engaging younger brother and her mother, the father being detained at home to make the dollars necessary for comfortable foreign travel before the day of knapsacks, matted long hair, dirty jeans, and young persons taking the measure of European civilization without a parent in sight as chaperone.

  Daisy Miller, as a work of fiction, is an open, candid narration; to cast light on the young heroine there must be someone to observe her, and to puzzle about her somewhat alarming “freedom” in conversation and her friendly manner with inferiors and equals. This someone is Winterbourne, an American educated in Geneva and returning to settle there. He is not given a profession and thus we assume he has “American money” and can follow his own inclinations. Americans long abroad, we find in James and in common experience, mingle mostly with their countrymen; the houses in Paris and Italy are more frugal in opening their doors. And so Winterbourne will drop over from Geneva to Vevey to visit his aunt, Mrs. Costello, who is staying at the same first-class hotel as the Miller family. However, outside the hotel, Winterbourne will chat with the aggressive little brother, who would accost a duke if he crossed his path. Daisy comes looking for her brother and Winterbourne decides the brother might serve as a sufficient introduction to the sister. Otherwise, “a young man wasn’t at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady save under certain rarely-occurring conditions.”

  Not at liberty to do this and that: thus the first articulation of the banal social proprieties that will condemn the provincial spontaneity, friendliness, and forthrightness of Daisy. Winterbourne is curious, however, and indeed charmed, since Daisy is “strikingly, admirably pretty,” although she is also something of a puzzle. They sit on a bench together and the young girl begins to chatter, “as if she had known him a long time. He found it very pleasant. It was many years since he had heard a young girl talk so much.” He offers to establish his own credentials as a gentleman by introducing her to his aunt.

  Daisy’s chatter, unremarkable to a contemporary ear, will be recognized as stunningly accurate and plausible for an unsophisticated girl of the period, or any period. She likes Europe and is having a good time, except that she doesn’t know anyone, hasn’t any “society.” In Schenectady, and in excursions to New York, she went to parties and had many gentleman friends, as well as young lady friends. “I’ve always had a great deal of gentlemen’s society,” she says. She expresses a desire to visit a famous local site, the Château de Chillon, but there is no one to take her, since her mother never goes anywhere and the little brother hates castles and wants to go home. Winterbourne offers his services and they visit the castle in due time. Meanwhile, Eugenio appears to announce lunch; he is a handsome man, a courier for hire by rich foreigners to speak the languages, order the carriages, arrange tickets. Daisy greets him as a friend, a traveling companion.

  Winterbourne visits his aunt and hears a summary of her impressions of the Miller family—she disapproves of them intensely, as if they were a band of shady, fortune-telling Gypsies entering the dining room. “They’re horribly common. They’re the sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by just ignoring.” She proceeds with the notable concentration and detail a snob always collects about the object for exclusion: Daisy has an “intimacy” with the courier; the family treats him as a gentleman and perhaps he dines with them; he is probably, handsome and well-mannered as he is, Daisy’s idea of a count; and so on. Winterbourne counters with the assertion that Daisy is very nice, just uncultivated. The aunt insinuates that Daisy is trying to capture Winterbourne and, in any case, she will not receive her.

  Daisy has taken note of the refined, elegant American Mrs. Costello, and has thought it would be interesting to meet her. Winterbourne hesitates, calling upon his aunt’s disabling headaches. “Well, I suppose she doesn’t have a headache every day,” Daisy says. Winterbourne can only reply that he thinks that is the case. After a pause Daisy says: “She doesn’t want to know me! Why don’t you say so? You needn’t be afraid. I’m not afraid!”

  Winterbourne returns to Geneva for some months, but he cannot forget Daisy and cannot solve the mystery of her nature: Is she a wanton flirt, an adventuress, or just a simple girl with outlandish energy for going about? The cast moves to Rome and there, with some misgivings about his emotions, Winterbourne joins the Miller family, his scandalized aunt, and another American, Mrs. Walker, long established in the city. Before he left Geneva he received a troubling letter from his aunt, who is still on the case, as it were: “Those people you were so devoted to last summer at Vevey have turned up here, courier and all.… [T]he courier continues to be the most intime. The young lady, however, is also very intimate with various third-rate Italians, with whom she rackets about in a way that makes much talk.”

  Mr. Giovanelli, the Italian Daisy i
s “racketing about” with, has a little mustache and speaks English very well, having “practised the idiom upon a great many American heiresses”; he is, in the view of Winterbourne, “anything but a gentleman; he isn’t even a very plausible imitation of one. He’s a music-master or a penny-a-liner or a third-rate artist.” Daisy takes him to an evening party at the establishment of Mrs. Walker, and at the end of the gathering Mrs. Walker cuts her dead, as the saying goes. There is an interesting passage about rich American women uniting with European titles, which Mr. Giovanelli lacks. Winterbourne’s kind explanation is: “Daisy and her mamma haven’t yet risen to that stage of—what shall I call it?—of culture, at which the idea of catching a count or a marchese begins. I believe them intellectually incapable of that conception.”

  In Henry James’s “international” fiction, the Americans are rich, a condition that brings them a woeful extension of knowledge when they confront the curious ways of Europeans who are not so rich but are anchored in pride of name and long residence. Mrs. Costello, Mrs. Walker, and Winterbourne are not of ancient European stock, but they have traveled much with confidence, settling here and there and thus forming their own sort of hierarchy. The accumulation of the Miller family may rival or exceed the others in the fiction, but their dollars are somewhat raw, just off the printing press.

  Daisy’s mother and her brother are in Europe on sufferance; the voyage is like a new, expensive pair of pinching shoes. Mrs. Miller is sickly, of a certain provincial torpor and harmless complacency, and with no more control over her daughter than if she were a runaway racehorse. Mrs. Miller finds herself disappointed in Rome because she has heard so much about it. She says she liked Zurich better and “we hadn’t heard half so much about it.”

  Daisy, however, is restless, filled with energy, and open to experience, but she is not one of the author’s “heiresses of all the ages.” We notice that in Rome she does not visit renowned items of cultural tourism such as the Sistine Chapel and the Pantheon. Cathedrals do not command her interest; what she likes are open spaces, the Pincian Gardens and, to her great misfortune, the Colosseum by moonlight. James has fashioned her in a plain, more or less uncomplicated way; her beautiful simplicity is the magic of the story. She is the moral center, a tribute to naturalness, thoughtless indiscretion, and youth, and in a way she is a shadowy tribute to the vast, new democratic country itself. We might wonder why her fellow Americans, once in Europe, have forgotten the pleasures of their inchoate but bracing homeland.

  A matter of fictional art is briefly inserted in the narration and will return, with significance, in the end. Daisy in her friendship with Giovanelli arouses the speculation that she is engaged to marry him. She trifles with Winterbourne, sometimes saying she is engaged and then saying no, she is not. No matter; a terrible punishment awaits the young girl. Winterbourne, very late one evening, with a cab waiting, decides to take a brief look at the Colosseum, “in the luminous dusk.” To his horror he finds Daisy and Giovanelli there. Rome at the time was a dangerous place because malarial insects bred in the Pontine Marshes, which were not entirely drained until the 1930s, under Mussolini. Winterbourne violently rebukes Giovanelli for taking the girl to the great, open, exposed place. Perhaps Roman natives had developed a degree of immunity; Giovanelli says he was not afraid for himself, that he cautioned Daisy, who persisted, saying she would later get some pills from Eugenio.

  Daisy is taken seriously ill, and in the moments before her death she again and again insists that her mother tell Winterbourne she was not engaged. These last words seem to mean that, for all her flippancy with him, she recognized the seriousness of his watchfulness, the dignity of his affection, and that she returned it.

  She is buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Giovanelli, who did not visit her at the hospital, is at the graveside. He was, it appears, shrewd about Daisy and knew from the first that he would not conquer her or her fortune. “If she had lived I should have got nothing. She never would have married me.” By way of investigation it is learned that Giovanelli is not a scoundrel; he is a respectable man, an avvocato, if not in the best society. Winterbourne, reflecting on Daisy, feels that he has lived too long in foreign parts and has somehow lost the “tone” that would have enabled him better to understand a vivid young creature from Schenectady.

  Oddly enough, the memorial language for Daisy comes from the uncertified gentleman, Giovanelli: “She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable. Also—naturally!—the most innocent.”

  James, in his fiction, was an acute and sympathetic chronicler of young persons, even though he was a resolute bachelor. True, Daisy, Morgan Moreen in The Pupil, and Miles in The Turn of the Screw are dispatched to an early death, a drastic removal. A capricious fate has put the children in the care of adults who are not their equal in sensibility and imagination, even if it must be said that the governess in The Turn of the Screw has a superabundance of overheated, evil, destructive imagination.

  In the matter of supervision, there is in the novel The Awkward Age a comic figure called the Duchess, who has been since the death of her Neapolitan grandee put in charge of his niece, Little Aggie. She keeps the child in a kind of purdah that is meant to insure a felicitous marriage. Aggie does not get a lord, but instead marries a genial rich fellow of very modest antecedents. Once married, Aggie bursts forth in London like a hoyden. James, in this case, would seem to recommend a reasonable amount of freedom for young girls before marriage as a better preparation for life than the hypocritical seclusion practiced in certain European circles.

  Daisy, faintly sketched, is a problem for analysis. She is a lonely girl without tradition or education who craves company and experience of life. With her almost excessive energy and curiosity, she seems an unlikely offspring of her kindly, moribund mother. Winterbourne is read by some critics as self-centered and priggish; read differently, Winterbourne is not so much cautious as realistic. He does not honor his aunt’s command to avoid the Millers and his banter in exchanges with Daisy is wittier than her own exclamations would indicate. It is to Winterbourne’s credit that he follows Daisy like a shadow, and his concern is a sort of unwilled love. At her death, he will know he has “missed the boat.”

  Had she returned to Schenectady, we cannot foresee what role Daisy would have assumed. If she were to be still a flirt with her gentlemen friends, they would have found her mysteriously altered, not the provincial flirt they had known.

  Daisy does not return to Schenectady. Instead, she lives on, a figure out of literature who has entered history as a name, a vision.

  —

  ELIZABETH HARDWICK is the author of many books and essays, including Herman Melville (Penguin Lives), Sleepless Nights, and American Fictions, available as a Modern Library paperback. She lived in New York City.

  PREFACE TO THE NEW YORK EDITION1

  It was in Rome during the autumn of 1877; a friend then living there but settled now in a South less weighted with appeals and memories happened to mention—which she might perfectly not have done—some simple and uninformed American lady of the previous winter, whose young daughter, a child of nature and of freedom, accompanying her from hotel to hotel, had “picked up” by the wayside, with the best conscience in the world, a good-looking Roman, of vague identity, astonished at his luck, yet (so far as might be, by the pair) all innocently, all serenely exhibited and introduced: this at least till the occurrence of some small social check, some interrupting incident, of no great gravity or dignity, and which I forget. I had never heard, save on this showing, of the amiable but not otherwise eminent ladies, who weren’t in fact named, I think, and whose case had merely served to point a familiar moral; and it must have been just their want of salience that left a margin for the small pencil-mark inveterately signifying, in such connexions, “Dramatise, dramatise!” The result of my recognising a few months later the sense of my pencil-mark was the short chronicle of “Daisy Miller,” which I indited in London the following s
pring and then addressed, with no conditions attached, as I remember, to the editor of a magazine that had its seat of publication at Philadelphia and had lately appeared to appreciate my contributions. That gentleman however (an historian of some repute) promptly returned me my missive, and with an absence of comment that struck me at the time as rather grim—as, given the circumstances, requiring indeed some explanation: till a friend to whom I appealed for light, giving him the thing to read, declared it could only have passed with the Philadelphian critic for “an outrage on American girlhood.” This was verily a light, and of bewildering intensity; though I was presently to read into the matter a further helpful inference. To the fault of being outrageous this little composition added that of being essentially and pre-eminently a nouvelle; a signal example in fact of that type, foredoomed at the best, in more cases than not, to editorial disfavour. If accordingly I was afterwards to be cradled, almost blissfully, in the conception that “Daisy” at least, among my productions, might approach “success,” such success for example, on her eventual appearance, as the state of being promptly pirated in Boston—a sweet tribute I hadn’t yet received and was never again to know—the irony of things yet claimed its rights, I couldn’t but long continue to feel, in the circumstance that quite a special reprobation had waited on the first appearance in the world of the ultimately most prosperous child of my invention. So doubly discredited, at all events, this bantling met indulgence, with no great delay, in the eyes of my admirable friend the late Leslie Stephen and was published in two numbers of The Cornhill Magazine (1878).

  It qualified itself in that publication and afterwards as “a Study”; for reasons which I confess I fail to recapture unless they may have taken account simply of a certain flatness in my poor little heroine’s literal denomination. Flatness indeed, one must have felt, was the very sum of her story; so that perhaps after all the attached epithet was meant but as a deprecation, addressed to the reader, of any great critical hope of stirring scenes. It provided for mere concentration, and on an object scant and superficially vulgar—from which, however, a sufficiently brooding tenderness might eventually extract a shy incongruous charm. I suppress at all events here the appended qualification—in view of the simple truth, which ought from the first to have been apparent to me, that my little exhibition is made to no degree whatever in critical but, quite inordinately and extravagantly, in poetical terms. It comes back to me that I was at a certain hour long afterwards to have reflected, in this connexion, on the characteristic free play of the whirligig of time. It was in Italy again—in Venice and in the prized society of an interesting friend, now dead, with whom I happened to wait, on the Grand Canal, at the animated water-steps of one of the hotels. The considerable little terrace there was so disposed as to make a salient stage for certain demonstrations on the part of two young girls, children they, if ever, of nature and of freedom, whose use of those resources, in the general public eye, and under our own as we sat in the gondola, drew from the lips of a second companion, sociably afloat with us, the remark that there before us, with no sign absent, were a couple of attesting Daisy Millers. Then it was that, in my charming hostess’s prompt protest, the whirligig, as I have called it, at once betrayed itself. “How can you liken those creatures to a figure of which the only fault is touchingly to have transmuted so sorry a type and to have, by a poetic artifice, not only led our judgement of it astray, but made any judgement quite impossible?” With which this gentle lady and admirable critic turned on the author himself. “You know you quite falsified, by the turn you gave it, the thing you had begun with having in mind, the thing you had had, to satiety, the chance of ‘observing’: your pretty perversion of it, or your unprincipled mystification of our sense of it, does it really too much honour—in spite of which, none the less, as anything charming or touching always to that extent justifies itself, we after a fashion forgive and understand you. But why waste your romance? There are cases, too many, in which you’ve done it again; in which, provoked by a spirit of observation at first no doubt sufficiently sincere, and with the measured and felt truth fairly twitching your sleeve, you have yielded to your incurable prejudice in favour of grace—to whatever it is in you that makes so inordinately for form and prettiness and pathos; not to say sometimes for misplaced drolling. Is it that you’ve after all too much imagination? Those awful young women capering at the hotel-door, they are the real little Daisy Millers that were; whereas yours in the tale is such a one, more’s the pity, as—for pitch of the ingenuous, for quality of the artless—couldn’t possibly have been at all.” My answer to all which bristled of course with more professions than I can or need report here; the chief of them inevitably to the effect that my supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else; since this is what helpful imagination, in however slight a dose, ever directly makes for. As for the original grossness of readers, I dare say I added, that was another matter—but one which at any rate had then quite ceased to signify.