Daisy Miller (101-Page Classics) -

Henry James

Alma Books

2022

101 páginas

3h 22m

ISBN-13: 9781847498656

When the young American Frederick Winterbourne meets his compatriot Daisy Miller in the garden of a grand hotel in Switzerland, he is struck by her beauty, but slightly unsettled by her open ways and her flirtatiousness. Undeterred by this and by his aunt's disapproval, he invites her to join him in a jaunt to a nearby castle, little suspecting that this will set in train a sequence of events that promises to be a source of heartache and disappointment for him, and threatens to compromise his own social acceptability.

One of Henry James's most enduringly popular works, Daisy Miller, here published in its 1909 version, incorporating the author's final revisions, is a masterly, psychologically nuanced dissection of social mores and a merciless critique of convention and staid respectability.

Resenhas (11)

3 (Bom)

"Say goodbye to Daisy Miller!"

The interest for this most beloved among Henry James' novels arouse during the venture of watching the complete 'Gilmore Girls' in the short period of two months. Even though the number of literary references is overwhelming, and rather impossible to be accomplished by any who endeavor to follow them closely, this one particularly caught my attention. The episode was entitled “Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller” and involved a plot of shipping one of the main characters to the old continent. With the novel serendipitously at hand I promptly rushed to take a look at it. And I was not sorry. The story of the American flirt that puzzles and shocks everyone around her is but a fine welcome to James' work. The style is soft and vigorous, without much of adornments, but filled with refine subtleties—as expected for the time and writer. Although the narrator (a portrait of James himself, some say) was not appealing, Daisy’s freshness and mystifying naïveté is enough to keep us yearning to follow Winterbourne’s steps after another glimpse of the beauty. Criticisms generally regard the character as a symbol of innocence and lack of prejudice of the young America. However (and I’m quoting Italo Calvino here) it is a tale not less mysterious than others by this introverted writer, entirely weaved by themes that always reveal themselves amidst light and shadow, tied up by what is left unsaid.