1.London, 1957, pp. 13–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2.“The First International Novel”, PMLA, LXXIII, September, 1958, pp. 418–425.Google Scholar

3.First published in the Cornhill, December, 1878, and January, 1879, it was very slightly revised before being issued by Macmillan as the second story in Daisy Miller and Other Stories, February, 1879. Harpers had brought out a separate American edition in the previous month. The story appeared with The Pension Beaurepas and The Point of View as volume 12 of the Macmillan edition of 1883, and it was included with certain revisions in Lady Barbarina, Vol. XIV of the New York Edition.Google Scholar

4.Lady Barbarina, The Novels and Stories of Henry James, London, 1922, p. v.Google Scholar

5.Lady Barbarina, The Novels and Stories of Henry James, p. viii.Google Scholar

6.Vol. XXVII, October 3, 1878, pp. 208 – 9. This article was James's contribution to a controversy in the columns of this periodical on the subject of the behaviour of Americans abroad. In the Nation for April 18, 1878, an article entitled “The American Colony in France” appeared above the initials “I.M.” The author wrote of the prevailing “wonderful ignorance of the habits, behavior, and feelings of Europeans,” and in his comments on American women who remain in France he singled out “young girls travelling together without chaperonage or duennage, sans peur and all, of course, sans reproche; but no amount of conscious rectitude will get them the respect of people who are accustomed to draw certain inferences from certain appearances.” A defence of American women by “J. P. T.” then appeared in the correspondence columns on May 30, 1878. “J.P. T.” thought that “I. M.” “by generalising exceptional behavior … has cast an unworthy suspicion upon multitudes of American women in Europe; and by endorsing the prejudicial and unscrupulous gossip of a class as the tone of society, he has given a picture of society in Paris which may well disquiet in America those who have female relations or friends in the French capital”. In view of the fact that Daisy Miller was about to appear in the Cornhill for June, 1878, these further observations by “J. P. T.” are of particular interest: “No doubt, years ago, European society was scandalized by the irruption of American manners upon the Continent, and especially by the fast and independent ways of American women … But those days of misconception and prejudice are passing away.” The letter concludes, somewhat smugly, by suggesting that while there were American women “who discredit their sex by their effrontery” they would be found chiefly in Paris; Germany – from where the letter was sent – understood and accepted “the personal independence to which the American girl is trained …”Google Scholar

7.Fenimore Cooper in his portraits of belligerently nationalistic Americans such as Steadfast Dodge was perhaps the first American consciously to present this trait in fiction.Google Scholar

8.James goes on to mention friends who have encountered “a few more specimens of the young unattached American lady… and, according to their different point of view, she has seemed to them a touching or a startling phenomenon.” Possibly James also had in mind his own recently published Daisy Miller, critical interpretations of which were divided as to whether the heroine was “touching” or “startling”.Google Scholar

9.cf. James's letter to James, William, May 1, 1878: “I am still completely an outsider here, and my only chance for becoming a little of an insider (in that limited sense in which an American can ever do so) is to remain here for the present.” Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, London, 1920, I, p. 60.Google Scholar

10.The Shock of Recognition, ed. Edmund, Wilson, London, 1956, p. 460.Google Scholar

11.This quality she shares with an earlier heroine, Caroline Spencer, to whom the narrator of Four Meetings remarks: “You have the native American passion – the passion for the picturesque. With us, I think, it is primordial – antecedent to experience. Experience comes and only shows us something we have dreamt of.” – Scribner's Monthly, XV, November, 1877, p. 46. A greatly revised and expanded version of this passage in the New York Edition begins: “You've the great American disease, and you've got it ‘bad’ – the appetite, morbid and monstrous, for colour and form, for the picturesque and the romantic at any price.” – The Author of Beltraffio, Novels and Stories, p. 241.Google Scholar

12.Selected Letters, ed. Leon, Edel, London, 1956, p. 107.Google Scholar

13.Daisy Miller and Other Stories, London, 1879, I, p. 248.Google Scholar

14.Daisy Miller and Other Stories, London, 1879, II, pp. 5 – 6.Google Scholar

15.Daisy Miller and Other Stories, London, 1879 p. 129.Google Scholar

16.Daisy Miller and Other Stories, pp. 60 – 61. This distinction is in many ways similar to that found in some of W. D. Howells's novels. In a letter to James he described a conflict occurring between “two extreme American types: the conventional and the unconventional.” – Life in Letters, ed. Mildred Howells, London and New York, 1929, I, pp. 174– 5.Google Scholar

17.Selected Letters, pp. 107 – 8.Google Scholar

18.“The First International Novel”, p. 423.Google Scholar

19.p. 357.Google Scholar

20.Journalist, traveller, one-time member of Parliament and mystic, Oliphant (1829 – 1888) was the author of many articles and books including the popular Piccadilly. Tender Recollections first appeared in two parts in Blackwood's December, 1877, and January, 1878. In May of 1878 it was issued anonymously as one of the stories in the first volume of a new series of Tales from Blackwood. Although this publication was the ostensible cause of the review James had probably read the story on its first appearance, for he refers in his note to “that clever little story which a few months since was the occasion of a good deal of amusement and conjecture.” Tender Recollections was again reprinted in Traits and Travesties, 1882, when Oliphant finally acknowledged authorship. A prefatory note denies the caricaturing of individuals and goes on: “If I have laughed at the follies of the fashionable world in New York, they are certainly not greater, are far more harmless than those which characterise the same world in the great cities of Europe … I am encouraged to think that my American friends regard this story with a certain complacency, because all the claimants for its authorship have been Americans - indeed, one went so far as to write a continuation of it.”Google Scholar

21.James presumably takes over the word from Oliphant's story. It is interesting to note that Percy Beaumont says to Lord Lambeth concerning Bessie Alden: “Depend upon it she will try to hook you.” In the revised edition, however, the sentence becomes: “Depend upon it she'll try to land you.” Two of the most famous of international marriages had already taken place in the seventies: in 1874 Jennie Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill, and in 1876 Consuelo Yznaga married the Duke of Manchester.Google Scholar

22.Earlier in his note James had written: “Conjecture… after indulging in a good many fanciful guesses, has attributed the thing, without contradiction, we believe, to Mr. Laurence Oliphant.”Google Scholar

23.Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, CXXII, December, 1877, p. 656.Google Scholar

24.Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, CXXII, December, 1877, p. 663.Google Scholar

25.Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, CXXII, December, 1877, p. 669. In the light of this statement compare Mrs. Westgate's accountof the Duke of Erin-Green.Google Scholar

26.Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, CXXII, December, 1877, p. 664.Google Scholar

27.Daisy Miller and Other Stories, II, p. 9.Google Scholar

28.Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, CXXIII, January, 1878, p. 47.Google Scholar

29.Daisy Miller and Other Stories, II, p. 138.Google Scholar

30.Daisy Miller and Other Stories, II, p. 132.Google Scholar

31.cf. James's essay on Newport written in 1870: “Nowhere else in this country – nowhere, of course, within the range of our better civilization – does business seem so remote, so vague, and unreal. It is the only place in America in which enjoyment is organized… Individuals here, of course, have private cares and burdens to preserve the balance and dignity of life; but collective society conspires to forget everything that worries. It is a singular fact that a society that does nothing is decidedly more pictorial, more interesting to the eye of contemplation, than a society which is hard at work.” – Portraits of Places, London, 1883, p. 342.Google Scholar

32.Daisy Miller and Other Stories, I, p; 233.Google Scholar

33.Letters of Henry James, I, p. 66.Google Scholar

34.Letters of Henry James, pp. 67 – 8. In a letter of June 8 to Grace Norton James wrote of the “great plump flourishing uglinesses and drearinesses which offer themselves irresistibly as pin-cushions to criticism and irony. The British mind is so totally unironical in relation to itself that this is ajperpetual temptation.” – p. 70.Google Scholar

35.Many years later W. D. Howells wrote: “it is pathetic to remember how “Daisy Miller” was received, or rather rejected, as an attack on American girlhood, and yet it Is perfectly intelligible that it should have been taken so by Americans who had still a country to be so inclusively proud of that they could not bear the shadow of question to fall upon any part of it. “He then suggests that if Daisy Miller were to “come again” Americans would see her “innocent freedom in the face of immemorial convention with the liberal and tolerant pleasure which the English at once felt in it.” – Heroines of Fiction, London and New York. 1901, II, p. 169.Google Scholar

36.At least one book was written to refute James's supposed slurs on American womanhood: Virginia Wales Johnson's An English “Daisy Miller”, Boston, 1882. Dedicated to “American Women” this short tale traced the scandalous life and pathetic death of Ethel Hooper, a convention-defying English girl on the Continent.Google Scholar

37.James, wrote to Mrs. Hill a long letter of self-justification, citing his aims and purposes, which has been printed by Leon Edel in his Selected Letters, pp. 103 – 8. Professor Edel points out that this is the only letter by James to a reviewer of one of his works which is known to exist.Google Scholar

38.Daily News, March 21, 1879, 6: 4.Google Scholar

39.The Academy, XV, March 22, 1879, p. 256. The character of Lord Lambeth may also owe something to that of Lord Rufford in Trollope's novel The American Senator, London, 1877 one of the most humorous and at the same time most percipient of nineteenth century novels dealing with Anglo-American relations.Google Scholar

40.Vol XLIII, June. 1879 p. 759.Google Scholar

41.In his description! of the English dowager: “She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks her advance is elephantine. When she sits down, it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move her.” – Our Old Home London, 1863, I, p. 73. James's description of the Duchess was modestly and perhaps wisely confined to the fact that she was “a large lady, with a fine fresh colour.” James might well have been commenting on the reception of his own work when he wrote of Our Old Home in his Hawthorne: “The book gave but limited satisfaction, I believe, in England, and I am not sure that the failure to enjoy certain manifestations of its sportive irony has not chilled the appreciation of its singular grace.” Throughout the century many American commentators had noticed the tendency in all strata of English society to revere aristocracy. Hawthorrie's wife, for example, wrote to her father in the fifties: “It is a deep and great question – this about rank. Birth and wealth often are causes of the superior civilization and refinement that are found with them. In this old civilization there seems to be no jealousy, no effort to alter position… “– Quoted in Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne, London, 1897, p. 256. James was to explore some of the implications of the above statement in The Princess Casamassima.Google Scholar