Daisy Miller Reading Order

Daisy Miller (1878) by Henry James is the novella that first brought James international notice and that best represents his early American-in-Europe theme in its simplest and most affecting form — the story of Annie P. Miller (Daisy), the innocent and unconventional American girl from Schenectady, New York, whose Roman social behavior is misinterpreted by both the cynical expatriate society that judges her and the admiring but paralyzed Frederick Winterbourne who watches her. The novella is organized around the question of whether Daisy is innocent or flirtatious, and James keeps the answer deliberately ambiguous throughout — the irony of the ending (Daisy dies of Roman fever, vindicated by her dying words, but only posthumously recognized by Winterbourne) is one of the most perfectly calibrated in nineteenth-century short fiction.