[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 Swiss novelist of incomparable talent has indeed written a tale expressly to prove that frank nature is wofully out of favor there, and his heroine dies of a broken heart because her spontaneity passes for impropriety." James might have been stating the theme of Daisy Miller. The book to which he referred is Paule Méré, which he described the next year [in North American Review, October, 1873] as "an attempted exposure, rather youthful in its unsparing ardor, of the narrowness and intolerance of Genevese society." The similarity of Daisy Miller and Paule Méré does not extend beyond the theme, but it seems probable that when James came to develop into a story the anecdote which he heard in Rome in 1877, his recollection of the moral atmosphere of Switzerland and his familiarity with Cherbuliez's novel on the same theme caused him to place the first half of his story in Switzerland. He had already identified this country as a place where one could become the victim of rigid social conventions.

A second article which seems related to Daisy Miller is "The After-Season at Rome," printed in the Nation for June 12, 1873. In it James speaks of spending an afternoon hour at the little Protestant Cemetery which nestles in an angle of the city wall. He mentions the graves of Shelley and Keats, and continues:

But to my sense, the most touching thing there is the look of the pious English inscriptions among all these Roman memories. There is something extremely appealing in their universal expression of that worst of trouble—trouble in a foreign land. . . . I may seem unduly sentimental; but I confess that the charge to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, who was drowned in the Tiber in 1824: "If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever cropt in its bloom"—seemed to me irresistibly a case for tears.

Daisy also is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, a lovely flower cropt in its bloom, a young American pathetically dead in a foreign land. The anecdote James used as basis for his story was climaxed only by "some small social check, some interrupting incident, of no great gravity or dignity" [James, The Art of the Novel, 1934]. James's conclusion with Daisy's death, sometimes condemned by critics, may stem back to the author's afternoon hour of meditation in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome five years earlier. As a traveller who had "the novelist's faculty—observation raised to the degree of a passion," James gathered impressions which of course influenced his novels, and occasionally, as here, we are able to trace a connection between travel sketches and story.

There is a further and amusing connection between Cherbuliez's Paule Méré and Daisy Miller. Mrs. Costello, Winterbourne's aunt and one of the harshest critics of Daisy Miller, at one point in the story writes to her nephew:

Those people you were so devoted to last summer at Vevey have turned up here, courier and all. . . . They seem to have made several acquaintances, but the courier continues to be the most intime. The young lady, however, is also very intimate with various third-rate Italians, with whom she rackets about in a way that makes much talk. Bring me that pretty novel of Cherbuliez's—Paule Méré—and don't come later than the 23rd.

Since Paule Méré is an exposure of the narrowness and intolerance of Genevese society, of people like Mrs. Costello, her request for "that pretty novel" in the same paragraph in which she reveals her own intolerance can only mean that she has completely missed the author's intention, interpreting the story as an attack on Paule Méré rather than on her critics. This is another example of James's irony—an irony which might almost be called prophetic, in the light of the misinterpretation of Daisy Miller as an outrage on American girlhood by the editor to whom James first submitted it and by many readers.