SOURCE: "Defense of Daisy Miller," in Discovery of a Genius: William Dean Howells and Henry James, edited by Albert Mordell, Twayne Publishers, 1961, pp. 88-91.

Howells, James's editor and literary agent for much of the author's career, was the chief progenitor of American Realism and one of the most influential American literary critics of the late nineteenth century. Through realism, a theory central to his fiction and criticism, he aimed to disperse "the conventional acceptations by which men live on easy terms with themselves" so that they might "examine the grounds of their social and moral opinions. " In the following essay, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1879, Howells responds to critics who had dubbed Daisy Miller "an outrage on American Girlhood."

To read the silly criticisms which have been printed, and the far sillier ones which are every day uttered in regard to Mr. James's Daisy Miller would...