Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… a provincial and innocent young American from Schenectady, New York, traveling around Europe with her family. Although Daisy admires the manners and décor of Old World high society, she’s quite a controversial figure in the drawing rooms of Europe. Some would say that she has no sense of propriety, and others would go so far as to call her behavior inappropriate. But Daisy, ever the flirt, plays by her own rules.
Personality… independent, lively, and a tad naïve. Daisy takes all the energy and vigor of the New World with her to Europe, but her hardiness can be a bit disagreeable to others. Her naiveté doesn’t necessarily make her innocent, and her character often leads to controversy.
Get to Know her in...
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In this comedy of manners, the American Winterbourne tries to figure out the bright and bubbly Daisy Miller, only to be helped and hindered by false judgments from their fellow friends.
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Originally published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1878 and in book form in 1879, Daisy Miller brought Henry James his first widespread commercial and critical success. The young Daisy Miller, an American on holiday with her mother on the shores of Switzerland’s Lac Leman, is one of James’s most vivid and tragic characters. Daisy’s friendship with an American gentleman, Mr. Winterbourne, and her subsequent infatuation with a passionate but impoverished Italian bring to life the great Jamesian themes of Americans abroad, innocence versus experience, and the grip of fate. As Elizabeth Hardwick writes in her Introduction, Daisy Miller “lives on, a figure out of literature who has entered history as a name, a vision.”
