Jamaica Inn
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First published in 1936, Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn follows Mary Yellan, a young woman who travels across the bleak Cornish moors after her mother’s death to live with her aunt Patience and uncle Joss Merlyn. At the isolated inn, she discovers that its sinister reputation is well deserved: Joss is involved in smuggling and murder, and Patience lives in fearful submission to her husband. As Mary struggles to protect her aunt, she is drawn into a dangerous world of secrecy, violence and uneasy alliances, uncertain whom she can trust.
Inspired by the real Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor, du Maurier transforms the Cornish landscape into a force of its own, its vast emptiness mirroring the menace within the inn’s dark rooms. Blending Gothic fiction with the momentum of an adventure story, the novel explores courage, coercion, moral corruption and a young woman’s determination to resist the world imposed upon her. It helped establish du Maurier’s gift for creating places that seem haunted by their own histories, and remains one of her most vivid and unsettling works.
From the book
“No trees, no lanes, no cluster of cottages or hamlet, but mile upon mile of bleak moorland, dark and untraversed, rolling like a desert land to some unseen horizon.”
— Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn
On Jamaica Inn
“A novel of high adventure, a melodramatic romance that possesses sweep and power.”
— The Salt Lake Tribune, 31 May 1936