Daisy Miller

Henry James was born in New York, New York, in 1843. Throughout his life, he often straddled the boundaries of geographical places, social changes, and even sexual identity. This ambiguity and “both/and” nature of James’s life gave him unique authority to illustrate the themes in Daisy Miller.

While James was born in New York, he and his well-known and wealthy family spent a lot of time in the intellectual social circles of Massachusetts and traveled often to Europe. His father encouraged his children to pursue higher education and travel widely. Like Winterbourne in Daisy Miller, Henry James spent much of his formative years and early education in Europe; he and his brother, William, also studied at Harvard, his brother becoming known as the “Father of American Psychology.” James’s knowledge of upper-class American society, as well as European sensibilities and the conflicts that can arise when the two collide, appear in the writing of Daisy Miller. James eventually spent so much time in England that he became a British citizen in 1915, the year before he died. A citizen of both countries, James was neither wholly American nor English.

Though James and his family were certainly wealthy and well-known, like Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Watson in Daisy Miller, his father’s leadership of their family was somewhat unorthodox. He was a progressive theologian and was interested in utopian societies; though he came into contact with leaders in the American transcendentalist movement such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Bronson Alcott, they did not agree with many of his perspectives. A proto-feminist, James’s father advocated for the liberalization of divorce and supported his daughter, Alice, who was a teacher and diarist who never married. The way James seems to question the harsh judgment of Daisy’s behavior in the novella points to an impending sea change in the role of American women in society. Here, he is illustrating a woman caught between the strict guidelines for women in the Victorian era and their liberation in the Modern period to come.

Henry James’s sexuality is another ambiguity that has been the subject of scholarly debate, especially because it is relevant to the themes of his work, including Daisy Miller. James never married and many people believed him to be completely celibate, but many of his letters to both male and female friends contain such thinly-veiled eroticism that it is difficult to ascertain his true sexual identity. Although James and his family were members of a high social rank in American society and enjoyed the privileges that come with that status, he may have also felt like an interloper and, like Daisy, questioned the rules prescribed to men and women for the sake of propriety.

There are parallels between James’s life and the themes and characters of Daisy Miller. Like James, protagonist Daisy is caught between an old world and a new one. Like many ahead of their time, she is a casualty of the old guard’s resistance to change.