SOURCE: "Daisy Miller, Tradition, and the European Heroine," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. VI, No. 1, March, 1969, pp. 45-59.

Deakin is an American author and educator. In the following essay, he places Daisy Miller within the tradition of European literary heroines found in the works of Turgenev, Cherbuliez, George Sand, and Mme de Sta&7, and argues that, in these contexts, Daisy is symbolic of the ideal of dom.

When William Dean Howells selected Daisy Miller as the one Jamesian character to emphasize in his Heroines of Fiction, he did her two great services. First, he, as the dean of American critics, certified her important position in both the Jamesian canon and in the literary world at large. Second, he affirmed by both precept and example that she would be understood best not as an isolated phenomenon but as a part of a literary tradition. The reasons for Daisy's significance...