SOURCE: "Reassembling Daisy Miller," in American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 232-54.

In the following essay, Wardley explores the role of flirtation in Daisy Miller.

There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west. Some of us are in more favorable positions than others to set new fashions. Some of us are more striking personally, and imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

William James

When, at the end of the nineteenth century, critics of the "New Woman" discovered in her the features of the androgyne—the person who "flirted with hermaphroditism"—their description might have applied just as well to the person who grew up alongside her, the...