I have a complicated relationship with Henry James, because the man never found a happy ending he couldn’t ruin, and having read The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square and The Wings of the Dove as a teenager — when happy endings were very important to me — I had shed far too many tears of frustration over his pages to hold him in unreserved admiration.
On the other hand, I think about those stories a lot, more often that you might think, and any story that can so easily worm its way into my subconscious that I spend decades sporadically reflecting upon it, even when I didn’t like it, is indicative of a mighty literary talent. (I know! Henry James is a good writer! Who knew?)
Years ago, riding the wave of a then-recent hour-long rumination on the ultimate fate of Portrait‘s Isabel Archer, I decided I would attempt James again, and began collecting his assorted works. Daisy Miller is quite short, and as an experiment in assaying this most heartbreaking of authors once more, I thought it would be a good one to start with, a mere six years after first buying it. (Sigh.)
The titular Daisy is a beautiful free-spirit of a young girl who is touring Europe with her foolish mother and scapegrace little brother. In Switzerland, she outrages the wealthy expatriate travellers her family encounters with her independence of spirit — she dares to speak to people, even men, without an introduction, if you please — and in Italy her dalliance with a handsome but impoverished local puts her quite beyond the pale. Not that Daisy notices that she and her family have been sent to Coventry, she is having far too much fun. Observing all is the much-smitten Frederick Winterbourne, who comes from the right kind of family and yet is drawn to Daisy’s artlessness. If only Daisy could have realised her affection for him before tragedy strikes so maliciously! Because, of course, a happy ending would be out of the question, even in this early entry into the James canon (this novel was, in fact, his first big success), not least because such a lack of virtue as Daisy displayed — by going for walks unchaperoned, if you please — can obviously not be rewarded.
I really liked Daisy, and in many ways consider her something of an early feminist, even if mostly she was acting out of ignorance of established social rules. After all, why shouldn’t she talk to people? Why shouldn’t she go for a walk with whomever she wished? Hypocrisy and double standards are still with us, of course, but a book like this does, at the very least, remind us of how far we have come. For the most part, anyway.
I can’t say I loved this short novel entirely, or Winterbourne, who has all the hallmarks of an obsessive stalker type, but it is another James tale I will be thinking about for a long, long time. And in this case, I even think it’s a good thing.
SCORECARD
TBR DAY 262: Daisy Miller by Henry James
GENRE: Classic, General Fiction
PUBLISHED: 1878
TIME ON THE TBR: 6 years.
PURCHASED FROM: Op shop.
KEEP: Yep.
There was a time in the early part of the this decade — which is soon to end; I can’t believe it either — when it seemed like every second YA novel released was mired in some kind of dystopian hell world. This… is another one of those. And it’s not a bad one.
Whole swathes of this book are about illness. Serious illness, like the plague and a vicious influenza, one in the distant past and another in the distant future. 
Rarely has a book’s title been more accurate, because boy was a trapped into reading this. “Love stories with a difference” is the subtitle of this book, and hey, I like those! But the eight love stories in this book? They’re super religious, and I did not expect that at all. Though perhaps I should have, when the blurb says they are stories to “move, delight and inspire.”
I first encountered Ben H. Winters in his collaboration (I guess…) with Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. And while the conceit of that book palled after a while — and the 
When I learned that the character of Claire Temple, played by Rosario Dawson in the Netflix Marvel series — Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher and The Defenders — is based partially on the 1970s character Night Nurse, of course I had to find out more about her. After all, Claire was the best thing about most of those series, at least until they tried to make her a martial arts badass, and I loved the idea that so many decades ago Marvel had produced a mini-series based on a nursing professional with zero superpowers.
I have read dozens of Pride and Prejudice reimaginings, revisions and variations, many of which have been YA and yet more of which have moved the story into modern times and more diverse cultural milieus. Of those dozens of versions, quite the best of them all may very well be Pride, in which Zuri Benitez and Darius Darcy hate their way to love on the streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn.
A pandemic has swept across the world, with devastating effect. Not only did it wipe out 98% of the male population, it hit women even harder, and infant mortality became total. The human race looks to be on the edge of extinction, and many of its remaining females are being held captive and forced to serve the needs of the men who have claimed them.
The god Apollo, exiled to Earth and mortality by his angry father — unreasonably angry, by the way; it’s not like Apollo’s particular crime was worse than any committed by any of the Pantheon, including Zeus himself — has spent the past three books coming to terms with his new circumstances. Instead of his usual irresistible form, he is now caged within the body of lumpy and pimply teen Lester Papadopolous; instead of near-omnipotence, he is now only sporadically graced with a mere shadow of his former powers; and instead of inspiring awe and adoration he now has to constantly put up with mouthy kids rolling their eyes and him and calling him names.