Daisy Miller & An International Episode

Two Novels: Daisy Miller & An International Episode by Henry James

by Henry James (Author) & Harry W. McVickar (Illustrator)Publisher: Harper & Brothers, NY (copyright 1920)Hardcover - bound in dark blue cloth with gilt lettering5 x 7.8 inches, 295 pages (133 + 162 pp)
Daisy Miller is a novella by Henry James that first appeared in Cornhill Magazine in June–July 1878, and in book form the following year. It portrays the courtship of the beautiful American girl Daisy Miller by Winterbourne, a sophisticated compatriot of hers. His pursuit of her is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates when they meet in Switzerland and Italy.Daisy Miller was an immediate and widespread popular success for James, despite some criticism that the story was "an outrage on American girlhood". The story continues to be one of James' most popular works, along with The Turn of the Screw and The Portrait of a Lady. Critics have generally praised the freshness and vigor of the storytelling.
In 1909, James revised Daisy Miller extensively for the New York Edition. He altered the tone of the story, and many modern editions (Penguin; Broadview) prefer to print the original edition, their editors believing that the later edition is a diminution of the original, rather than an improvement.-----------------------An International Episode can be seen as a companion piece to Daisy Miller. It was published (a few months after Daisy Miller) in the December 1878 and January 1879 editions of Cornhill Magazine in England. Both stories have James's famous international theme — the collisions between the old world of Europe and the new of America. Both very young female American protagonists attract flawed admirers: Daisy (who seems to be in her late teens) is admired by the Europeanized American Winterbourne while they are in Switzerland and Italy; and twenty-year-old Bessie Alden meets the English Lord Lambeth with his cousin Percy Beaumont when they are visiting America.
Daisy represented that type of "new American woman" that James was to portray so often, but in a guise that was innocently flirtatious, bright, beguiling and woefully ignorant of the social mores, history, and culture of Europe; the snobbish forces of the old world conspire to defeat her. Bessie, on the other hand, is more similar to Isabel Archer: she's a Boston intellectual and democrat.
The plot hinges upon the visit paid to America on business by the somewhat cynical lawyer Percy Beaumont (a worldly denizen, as his name suggests, of the beau monde), accompanied by the rather "stupid" but handsome Lambeth. They are treated with open-hearted frankness and hospitality by the New York lawyer, Westgate, who invites them to stay with his "tremendously pretty" young wife Kitty and her younger sister Bessie at their seaside house in Newport.
Lambeth, on arriving in America, is keen to flirt with the local girls, who seem much more forward than their English counterparts. Percy, however, warns him not to, and, "like a clever man," "had begun to perceive that the observation of American society demanded a readjustment of one's standard."
This is the story's central theme; Lambeth is too dim to heed the advice.
James makes Bessie as spirited as Daisy, but less frivolous, "tremendously literary"; Kitty describes her to Percy as "extremely shy" and "a charming species of girl":
She is not in the least a flirt; that isn't at all her line. She is very simple — very serious. She is very cultivated, not at all like me — I am not in the least cultivated. She has studied immensely and read everything; she is what they call in Boston "thoughtful."Even Lambeth thinks: "If she was shy she carried it off very well." James seems not fully to make up his mind whether Bessie is as reserved or naïve as she seems.------------------------------Henry James, OM (15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916) was an American-British author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for a number of novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between emigre Americans, English people, and continental Europeans – examples of such novels include The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove. His later works were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often made use of a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to impressionist painting.
James also published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man and eventually settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916.