Daisy Miller
A young American woman in Europe behaves in ways that her compatriots find embarrassing, and a man who half loves her spends the novella trying to decide whether she is innocent or careless. James wrote it in Venice and Rome, and it made his name on both sides of the Atlantic.
The scandal is entirely a matter of interpretation: Daisy does nothing that a modern reader would consider shocking. That is the point. The novel is an anthropology of a small society's rules, and Winterbourne's inability to act is presented as a failure of imagination rather than of morals.
Public-domain status
First published in 1878. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Henry James died in 1916, so this work has been free to republish there since 1987.
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