Daisy Miller and Other Stories - Couverture souple

This title includes an introduction and notes by Pat Righelato, University of Reading. Daisy Miller is one of Henry James' most attractive heroines: she represents youth and frivolity. As a tourist in Italy, her American freedom and freshness of spirit come up against the corruption and hypocrisy of European manners. From its first publication, readers on both sides of the Atlantic have quarrelled about her, defending or attacking the liberties that Daisy takes and the conventions that she ignores. All three tales in this collection, "Daisy Miller", "An International Episode" and "Lady Barbarina", express James' most notable subject, 'the international theme', the encounters, romantic and cultural, between Americans and Europeans. His heroes and heroines approach each other on unfamiliar ground with new freedoms, yet find themselves unexpectedly hampered by old constraints.In "An International Episode", an English lord visiting Newport, Rhode Island, falls in love with an American girl, but their relationship becomes more complicated when she travels to London. In the light-hearted comedy "Lady Barbarina", a rich young American seeks an English aristocratic bride. The unusual outcomes of these three tales pose a number of social questions about marriage and the traditional roles of men and women. Is an international marriage symbolic of the highest cultural fusion of values or is it an old style raid and capture? Is marriage to remain the feminine destination?

Henry James was born the son of a religious philosopher in New York City in 1843. His famous works include The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, Daisy Miller, and The Turn of the Screw. He died in London in 1916, and is buried in the family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Keith Carabine, Senior Honorary Research Fellow, University of Kent at Canterbury, and Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), is the author of The Life and Art: A Study of Conrad's 'Under Western Eyes' (1996) and the literary editor of Wordsworth Classics. He has also written on Sherwood Anderson, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Wright Morris and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Pat Righelato teaches in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. From 1993 through 2000, she was coauthor of the review of contemporary poetry that appears annually in The Year's Work in English Studies. Righelato has also edited the Wordsworth Classics edition of Henry James's What Maisie Knew.