This compendium summarizes Henry James’s novella Daisy Miller, as presented in the two parts provided.

Part I. Frederick Winterbourne, an American expatriate residing in Geneva, encounters the Millers—Mrs. Miller, her pretty daughter Daisy (Annie P. Miller), and her small son Randolph—while staying at the Trois Couronnes hotel in Vevey. Daisy is an attractive, outspoken young American; her manners simultaneously candid and provocative unsettle Winterbourne, who has been long socialized in Europe and is uncertain how to classify her: innocent country girl, audacious flirt, or something between. After a casual, somewhat flirtatious acquaintance in the hotel garden, Daisy invites Winterbourne to visit the nearby Château de Chillon; he accepts. Winterbourne’s aunt, Mrs. Costello (Mrs. Costello/Costello is also called Mrs. Costello/Costello), a patrician, exclusive New Yorker, disapproves of the Millers as “common” and warns him against intimacy with Daisy. Despite this warning, Winterbourne accompanies Daisy to Chillon; their outing is intimate but decorous, and Daisy teases him about coming to Rome in winter.

Part II. Winterbourne later goes to Rome, where the Millers have taken lodging. He learns through his aunt and acquaintances that Daisy’s sociability with various men—particularly a handsome, urbane Italian, Mr. Giovanelli, and the family’s familiar courier, Eugenio—has provoked gossip among the expatriate community. Winterbourne vacillates between defending Daisy as merely uncultivated and perceiving her conduct as indiscreet by European standards. At a series of social encounters (the Pincio walk, Mrs. Walker’s drawing-room, and other gatherings) Daisy’s frank familiarity with male companions—and her habit of accepting escorts without her mother—alarms respectable acquaintances and elicits cold-shoulder ostracism. Mrs. Walker attempts to “rescue” Daisy’s reputation; Winterbourne argues in favor of the girl’s innocence but grows increasingly perplexed.

The crisis occurs after Winterbourne surprises Daisy and Giovanelli together at night in the Colosseum. Soon afterward Daisy contracts a fatal case of “Roman fever” (malaria) and dies. At her funeral Giovanelli laments her as “the most innocent” of women. Winterbourne, chastened, recognizes his earlier misjudgments and Mrs. Costello’s earlier warnings that prolonged foreign residence had blunted his American instincts; yet he also feels that Daisy would have welcomed esteem rather than censure. The novella closes with Winterbourne returning to Geneva, reflecting ambiguously on motives, misinterpretation, and cultural differences in manners, innocence, and reputation.