Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed. In "Daisy Miller" James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

Henry James (1843–1916) spent his early life in America but often traveled with his celebrated family to Europe. After briefly attending Harvard, he began to contribute both criticism and tales to magazines. Later, he visited Europe and began Roderick Hudson. Late in 1875, he settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola and wrote The American. In 1876, he moved to London, where two years later he achieved international fame with Daisy Miller. His other famous works include The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassma (1886), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1915, a few months before his death, he became a British subject.