The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller: A Novella
by Lawrence Kessenich
Pierian Springs Press
ISBN: 1965784151
140 pages
Review by Kevin M. McIntosh
Oh, Daisy. Since Henry James birthed (and killed) you in 1878, readers have celebrated, defamed, lamented, but, mainly, puzzled over you. A rich man’s daughter touring Switzerland and Italy in the socially essential company of your mother and little brother, seeing the culturally significant sights, attending the mandatory ex-pat parties, flirting with the men at hand, foreign and domestic, we continue to argue what you’re about. Libertine? Naif? Or proof of Cyndi Lauper’s timeless proposition that Girls just wanna have fun? Whatever. But James left us with an ugly question to ponder: Must a nice, high-spirited girl from Schenectady pay for her high spirits with her life?
No, says triple threat novelist-poet-playwright Lawrence Kessenich, in his charming, graceful, provocative answer to James, The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller.
Kessenich’s Daisy, having suffered but survived that Roman miasma, emerges toughened by her near-death experience, more a woman and less a curious, drifty girl. Winterbourne, the fellow ex-pat who squired her about those Swiss sights, enraptured by her beauty, critical of her indifference to nineteenth century gender norms, is put on his heels by this tougher Daisy. Encountering him in Paris, she takes him to task for having “deserted me on my sickbed.” When he is appalled at her strolling, unescorted, in the company of a married male friend, she tells him she has “no intention of misshaping myself into a society whose customs I disrespect.” Then she befriends the man’s spouse. Take that, old bean.
In granting Daisy further adventures, Kessenich answers the question James left hanging as to whether Miss Miller is a beautiful and smart force-of-nature or merely another pretty, wealthy American girl, flitting about Europe, fatally drunk, as some might say now, on her class-and-looks privilege. This new-and-improved Daisy is an emerging first-wave feminist. (And why not? As she points out, she was raised a stone’s throw from Seneca Falls.) Daisy’s natural curiosity and social courage draw her into the sphere of French suffragist Hubertine Auclert, make her a subject for famed portraitist (and Henry James buddy) John Singer Sargent. Daisy taking her rightful place among Sargent’s self-possessed beauties is, for my money, Kessenich’s historical masterstroke.
In addition to these engaging real-life figures, Further Adventures supplies the pleasures and avoids the pitfalls of historical fiction. As the tale unfolds in dueling first-person narratives between Daisy and Winterbourne, Kessenich wisely makes no attempt at imitating his source material. His voice deftly evokes James’s characters and settings, but he rightly eschews any attempt at Jamesian prose (a thicket of dependent clauses and semi-colons from which some have never escaped). And though this volume, like the original, is slim, we still get to stroll the Exposition Universelle, fly over the newly electrified City of Lights in a hot-air balloon. We get a sense of the old world made new, a world––like Daisy––reborn.
But, Daisy-being-Daisy, she can’t get past––even in reincarnation––being attracted to a man of the wrong sort. This time, however––Daisy 2.0––it’s not a fatal attraction. Her pursuit of said man and Winterbourne’s attempts at intervention form much of the climactic tension in this novella, but that’s not this Daisy’s real heart or the heart of her story. In this retelling, this addendum, Kessenich shows us the capacity for human growth (yes, even in a stick-in-the-mud like Winterbourne) and how that growth––plus courage––can change the world. The ending needn’t be inevitable, predictable. We can rewrite it if we have the guts. “I just want to be allowed to be myself,” Kessenich’s Daisy says. “But apparently in order to do that I will have to be strong.” True that. And a message worth embracing, for her world, and ours.
