Daisy Miller is a novella, a fictional form which combines the single focus of a short story with the more leisurely development of various themes typical of a novel. James, who preferred the French term nouvelle, liked the form because its "main merit and sign is the effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity — to arrive on behalf of the multiplicity at a certain science of control." To achieve the double effect of intensity and expansion that is its defining characteristic, a novella usually has a small cast of characters, a rather circumscribed physical and temporal setting and a limited set of associated themes and motifs which are developed in a highly suggestive manner. This description perfectly suits Daisy Miller where the narrative focus is always on Daisy's behavior and how it is interpreted by others, a reiterated process of action and...