Daisy Miller, Henry James - Viola Dunbar (essay date 1948)
Viola Dunbar (essay date 1948)
SOURCE: "A Note on the Genesis of Daisy Miller," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, April, 1948, pp. 184-86.
[In the following essay, Dunbar traces the development of James's novella.]
In his introduction, Henry James says that Daisy Miller originated in an anecdote about a young American girl which he heard in Rome in the autumn of 1877. However, two travel sketches which he wrote several years earlier help to explain the development of the story.
In 1872-73 James spent three months in Switzerland and six months in Rome, the two places which form the setting for Daisy Miller. In "Swiss Notes," contributed to the Nation for Sept. 19, 1872, he speaks of the moral individuality of Switzerland and of its want of a sense of humor. To support his own observation of the highly artificial character of life in Geneva, he refers to a novel by Cherbuliez: "A...
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