Book Review: Daisy Miller and other stories by Henry James

First in Switzerland, then in Italy, Mr. Winterbourne meets fellow American Miss Annie ‘Daisy’ Miller and her family. He vacillates between being attracted by her outgoing chatter and being repelled by it. Sometimes he believes it to be a sign of innocence, other times he suspects it as proof of ill-breeding or worse. Certainly her indiscriminate striking-up of friendships with porters and fortune-hunters is viewed by polite society as a mark of someone not fit to associate with. Winterbourne’s best efforts to make her understand why people are snubbing her come to nothing, and Daisy’s refusal to change her ways leads to tragedy.

Accompanying the quite brief (especially by James’s standards) Daisy Miller are three even shorter pieces. Longstaff’s Marriage chronicles the unexpected effects of unrequited love; Four Meetings describes exactly what the title suggests and manages to tell a character’s whole story in the process; and Benvolio is the tale of a young man who cannot reconcile the two sides of his nature.

Henry James in short story form is easier to read than Henry James in a novel, although he does revert to his customary long-windedness in Benvolio. That was the collection’s weakest link, with even the narrator admitting that the title character could get a little tiresome. The three preceding tales more than compensated; highly readable with interesting, well-observed characters. And if the endings weren’t happy, they were fitting. The conclusion to Daisy Miller in particular had an air of inevitability; something had to go wrong, and sure enough it did. That story was a vivid depiction of how people and their actions can be misinterpreted, and what can happen when the holders of opposing views stubbornly cling on to them. But I still wanted to reach through the pages to give Daisy a good prod and wake her up a bit; she could not - or would not - see how other people might misread her behaviour. (Honey, it’s the Victorian era; reputation is everything.) But I have to wonder . . . has James ever written a happy ending? Or, for that matter, a strong-willed female protagonist who hasn’t been brought down by fate or man?

Of the ‘other stories’, my favourite was Longstaff’s Marriage, despite its being a little improbable even for the notoriously sentimental Victorians; I liked the bookish spinster who narrated it. Come to think of it, I generally do like bookish spinsters - and I am not going to infer anything from that!

Rating: B