In her introduction to the edition I read, Elizabeth Hardwick describes Daisy Miller<\/i> 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.” Hardwick also talks about “the banal social proprieties that will condemn the provincial spontaneity, friendliness, and forthrightness of Daisy,” and yeah, that about sums it up. Daisy is an American girl in Europe with her bratty younger brother and her ineffectual mother; while they’re in Vevey, Switzerland, she meets Frederick Winterbourne, who’s 27 or so. He’s charmed by her beauty and alternately charmed\/puzzled\/bothered by her flirtatiousness, lack of interest in or knowledge of proper social behavior, and general idiosyncrasies. They talk in a garden and visit a castle. Later, in Rome, their paths cross again, only now Daisy is flirting with “various third-rate Italians”, though mostly just one in particular. She scandalizes all the American expat society ladies by “flirting with any man she can pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the evening with the same partner; receiving visits at eleven o’clock at night”: clearly “she has been going too far.” Winterbourne alternates between trying to give Daisy advice on how not to be ostracized and trying to tell others that she’s just a clueless innocent, though he can’t decide whether he thinks she actually is<\/i> innocent or not. Without giving away the ending entirely: he ultimately decides she’s innocent, but at that point it’s too late. He goes back to Geneva and his normal life, where rumor has it he’s romantically involved with “a foreign lady, a person older than himself” (hm, double standard much?!). <\/p>\n
I didn’t love Daisy Miller<\/i>, though I didn’t hate it either. There are some funny moments\u2014Daisy’s brother asking Winterbourne for a lump of sugar and promptly taking three; Winterbourne thinking maybe Mr. Miller is dead when Daisy’s brother says he’s “in a better place than Europe” (the kid just means his dad is in Schenectady); Winterbourne’s aunt and her friends gossiping in church in the midst of a service\u2014and some pleasing descriptions of European scenery, which I wanted more of. Also, I associate James with super-long\/lush\/elegant sentences, which I didn’t really find much of in this book\u2014maybe that’s more characteristic of his later work, but at any rate, I missed that style. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In her introduction to the edition I read, Elizabeth Hardwick describes Daisy Miller 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.” Hardwick also talks about “the banal social proprieties […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}