In the Library
Daisy Miller
Henry James, 1878
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 2
- Length
- Length 21k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
She would have appreciated one’s esteem.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
Wharton stages the same slow social execution, but her heroine understands every rule she is breaking and breaks them anyway.
£1.99
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
James returns to the American girl loose in Europe at full novel length, and this time she gets to make the choice that ruins her.
£1.99
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Chopin gives us another woman who simply stops performing the part expected of her, and a society with no category for what she becomes.
£1.99
About the book
She comes into the garden at Vevey in white muslin and a hundred frills, and the young American watching her cannot decide, then or ever, whether she is innocent. That hesitation is the book. Daisy Miller says what she thinks, goes where she likes, walks through Rome on the arm of an Italian nobody has vouched for, and the small colony of expatriate Americans closes against her with a politeness worse than a slap. Winterbourne could have spoken for her; he spends the winter weighing evidence instead. Nobody here is cruel on purpose, and everybody is cruel, and the whole cost falls on a girl who never grasped that she was being tried. James lets you watch a verdict form in a drawing room, in the turn of a hostess's shoulder, in a carriage that does not stop. Then he takes her to the Colosseum at midnight, where any Roman could have told her what the night air does. Winterbourne works her out in the end, a season too late to be of the smallest use to her.