One of Henry James’s most enduringly popular works, Daisy Miller, here published in its original 1879 version, is a wonderful novella about a dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

When the young American Frederick Winterbourne meets his compatriot Daisy Miller in the garden of a grand hotel in Switzerland, he is struck by her beauty, but slightly unsettled by her open ways and her flirtatiousness. Undeterred by this and by his aunt’s disapproval, he invites her to join him in a jaunt to a nearby castle, little suspecting that this will set in train a sequence of events that promises to be a source of heartache and disappointment for him, and threatens to compromise his own social acceptability. One of Henry James’s most enduringly popular works, Daisy Miller, here published in its 1909 version, incorporating the author’s final revisions, is a masterly, psychologically nuanced dissection of social mores and a merciless critique of convention and staid respectability.