Daisy Miller | Characters

The first of the great Jamesian heroines, Daisy is the prototype of "the American girl" of the post Civil War period — direct, independent and somewhat presumptuous. The contemporary reading public engaged in a lively debate about whether she was an unpatriotic image of American girlhood and at one point, as writer and critic William Dean Howells recalled, "The thing went so far that society almost divided itself into Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites." The controversy probably arose because by Victorian standards a heroine could be only good or bad, without a shadow of...

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