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."

-Goodreads