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 is going to set in train a chain
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 original 1879 version, is a masterly, psychologically
nuanced dissection of social mores and a merciless critique of convention and
staid respectability.