Henry James’s international novels can be read as a sociological critique of the transatlantic leisure class of new-money Americans and the European social establishment whom the Americans aspire to emulate.

America’s expanding post-Civil War economy was creating a new class of wealthy industrial, financial, and business elite who looked to Europe for the prestige of culture and refinement that money couldn’t buy them at home. James’s characters and settings represent a shift of influence and vitality from the old world to the new during America’s “Golden Age” of industrial capitalism that James contrasts with the staid and rule-bound world of European aristocratic and their inherited privilege.

Daisy Miller, whose free-spirited behavior charms some and shocks others, represents the kind of new-money American socialite becoming increasingly common in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Like other Jamesian females, a prime motive on Daisy’s grand tour of Europe is to find a suitable match for marriage, a premise that is central to James’s sociological critique of the “American invasion” of the old world enclaves of wealth.

As an American himself, James offers a unique perspective on the hierarchical class relations that had long defined European society and their clash with the aspirations of “classless” socially mobile Americans. A related example comes from Isabel Archer, protagonist of The Portrait of a Lady, who is repelled by the decadence and emptiness of the other American expatriates she meets on the continent. As with the narrator’s rejection of Daisy Miller based on her manners, Isabel is channeling James’s general depiction of Americans abroad and the cultural differences he suggests are unbridgeable.