Henry James’s Daisy Miller was an immediate sensation when it was first published in 1878 and has remained popular ever since. In this novella, the charming but inscrutable young American of the title shocks European society with her casual indifference to its social mores. The novella was popular in part because of the debates it sparked about foreign travel, the behaviour of women, and cultural clashes between people of different nationalities and social classes.
This Broadview edition presents an early version of James’s best-known novella within the cultural contexts of its day. In addition to primary materials about nineteenth-century womanhood, foreign travel, medicine, philosophy, theatre, and art—some of the topics that interested James as he was writing the story—this volume includes James’s ruminations on fiction, theatre, and writing, and presents excerpts of Daisy Miller as he rewrote it for the theatre and for a much later and heavily revised edition.
Comments
“Everything about this edition commends it to instructors, students, and general readers alike. Kristin Boudreau’s authoritative introduction provides an excellent orientation, no less for seasoned scholars than for students discovering Henry James. The text of the novella is well chosen—the 1879 Harper edition, capturing the freshness of James’s early style (as opposed to the ornate 1909 revision), but with the benefit of James’s revisions of the first magazine and book versions. Twelve appendices offer contemporary materials that cast strong and helpful lights on key aspects of James’s art and of the literary and cultural contexts of this early masterpiece.” — Daniel Mark Fogel, University of Vermont
“Kristin Boudreau’s fascinating and accessible introduction sets James’s Daisy Miller in biographical, literary, historical, philosophical—and even medical—context. Appendices provide ample and well-chosen primary material, including selections focused on the nineteenth-century New Woman; the prevalence and treatment of ‘Roman fever’; and James’s literary and artistic influences, aims, and revisions. Anyone teaching James’s popular novella will find Broadview’s new edition a superb resource.” — Linda Simon, Skidmore College
Acknowledgements
Introduction, Kristin Boudreau
Henry James: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Daisy Miller: A Study
Appendix A: Henry James on Daisy Miller
- From Henry James, Notebooks (11 November 1882)
- Eliza Lynn Linton, Letter to Henry James (1880)
- Henry James, Reply to Eliza Lynn Linton (1880)
- From Henry James, Preface to Daisy Miller (1909)
Appendix B: Literary and Artistic Influences
- From Lord Byron, “Manfred: A Dramatic Poem” (1817)
- From Henry James, Review of Victor Cherbuliez’s Paule Méré (October 1873)
- From Henry James, Unsigned Note on Velázquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (November 1874)
Appendix C: Henry James and the Craft of Fiction
- From Henry James, Hawthorne (1879)
- From Walter Besant, The Art of Fiction (1884)
- From Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884; revised 1888)
- From Henry James, Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1908)
Appendix D: Contemporary Reviews of Daisy Miller (1878-82)
- From “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (June-November 1878)
- From The New York Times (10 November 1878)
- From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (December 1878)
- From “Recent Novels,” The Nation (19 December 1878)
- From The North American Review (January 1879)
- From John Hay, “The Contributor’s Club,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1879)
- From William Dean Howells, Letter to James Russell Lowell (22 June 1879)
- From “New Books,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July-December 1879)
- From “Henry James, Jr.,” Century Magazine (November 1882)
Appendix E: Henry James and the Craft of Drama
- From Henry James, “The Parisian Stage,” The Nation (9 January 1873)
- From Henry James, “Tennyson’s Drama,” The Galaxy (September 1875)
- From James’s Letters and the Notebooks
- Letter to William James (6 February 1891)
- Letter to Elizabeth Lewis (15? December 1894)
- Letter to William and Alice James (29 December 1893)
- James, Notebooks (22 January 1899)
- From Henry James, “Note” to Theatricals: Second Series (1895)
- From Henry James, Preface to The Awkward Age (1908)
Appendix F: From Henry James, Daisy Miller: A Comedy in Three Acts (1883)
Appendix G: Contemporary Reviews of Daisy Miller: A Comedy in Three Acts (1883)
- From “Literary Notes,” The Independent (29 March 1883)
- From “Miscellaneous,” San Francisco Chronicle (30 September 1883)
- From “Daisy Miller as a Comedy,” Literary World (6 October 1883)
Appendix H: On Henry James’s Revisions
- William James, Letter to Henry James (4 May 1907)
- Max Beerbohm, “A Nightmare, Mr. Henry James Subpoenaed as Psychological Expert in a Cause Célèbre” (1908)
- Henry James, Letter to William James (17-18 October 1907)
- Parallel Texts from the 1879 and 1900 Editions of Daisy Miller
Appendix I: The Nineteenth-Century New Woman
- From Eliza Lynn Linton, The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays (1868; reprinted 1883)
- From Eliza Lynn Linton, Modern Women and What Is Said of Them (1868; reprinted 1870)
- Henry James, Review of Modern Women and What Is Said of Them (22 October 1868)
- From Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (1875)
- From From Lucy H. Hooper, “American Women Abroad,” The Galaxy (June 1876)
- From From Albert Rhodes, “Shall the American Girl Be Chaperoned?,” The Galaxy (October 1877)
Appendix J: Nineteenth-Century Travel
- From William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (1862)
- From From Alice A. Bartlett, “Some Pros and Cons of Travel Abroad,” Old and New (October 1871)
- From Henry James, “The Old Saint-Gothard: Leaves from a Note-book ” (22 October 1868)
- From “Preface,” Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Northern Italy (1875)
- From Switzerland, and the Adjacent Portions of Italy, Savoy, and the Tyrol: Handbook for Travellers (1877)
- Descriptions of Swiss Sights
- From Switzerland, and the Adjacent Portions of Italy, Savoy, and the Tyrol: Handbook for Travellers (1877)
- From Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont (1867)
- Descriptions of Italian Sights and Challenges
- From Italy: A Handbook for Travellers (1893)
- From A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs (1873)
Appendix K: “Roman Fever”
- From Peter S. Townsend, M.D., An Account of the Yellow Fever, as it Prevailed in the City of New York, in the Summer and Autumn of 1822 (1823)
- From Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
- From Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not (22 October 1868)
- “Miasma,” from A Dictionary of Medical Science (1895)
Appendix L: Daisy Miller and the Tradition of Pragmatism
- From Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly (November 1877)
- From William James, Pragmatism (1907)
- Henry James, Letter to William James (17 October 1907)
Works Cited and Recommended Reading
Kristin Boudreau is Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Megan Stoner Morgan is a doctoral student specializing in nineteenth-century American and British fiction at the University of Georgia.