Daisy Miller

At a hotel in Vevey, Switzerland, the reserved American expatriate Winterbourne meets Daisy Miller, a young American touring Europe with her family, and is drawn to her openness and disregard for the unwritten rules of expatriate society. When he encounters her again in Rome, Daisy's habit of keeping company with men unchaperoned, including an Italian acquaintance named Giovanelli, scandalizes the American and English colony there, and Winterbourne finds himself unable to decide whether she is innocent or simply indifferent to how she is judged.

Henry James's 1878 novella is a study of manners and misreading: Winterbourne watches Daisy through the assumptions of his social class and never quite manages to see her plainly, with consequences that prove serious. It remains one of James's most widely read shorter works and an early, precise account of the friction between American directness and European convention.