After her parents' divorce, five-year-old Maisie becomes the subject of a financial settlement, a "bitter pill" for both of them, a "package" sent from one to the other like a bomb, with the sole purpose of making their lives difficult. The tenderness and interest that her parents do not show her, the little girl finds in their new spouses. Stepmother and stepfather take care of the girl, who quickly begins to function as a link between them. Father, mother, governesses, new partners, some more permanent and others passing, get entangled in a whirlwind of conflict, jealousy, questions, interests, and love, the course of which we follow through Maisie's eyes.

Henry James does not dramatize or analyze Maisie's emotions. He wants to discover the way she perceives people and what happens around her, and the process by which she moves towards the moment when she will make decisions about her life on her own. "For the satisfaction of the mind and soul," the author himself writes in the preface, explaining the motives and the way he composed the novel, "the consciousness of the little girl had to be preserved, to be perceived as a register of impressions; not to be exaggerated, stained, or sterilized by ignorance and pain."

The world of "adults" through the eyes of a little girl who is at the center of her divorced parents' conflict. A remarkably modern novel written in 1897.