Why a Booktrail?
1820: You will never forget your visit to Jamaica Inn – a real literary setting to explore and indulge your wanderlust
Jamaica Inn
What you need to know before your trail
Following her mother’s dying request, Mary Yellan travels across the bleak moorland of Cornwall to reach Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. When she gets there she is shocked to find that Patience is a changed woman, cowered from her overbearing husband, Joss Merlyn.
The inn is a dark place and there’s a sense of foreboding all around. Mary tries to help her aunt in the house at the same time of keeping out of uncle Joss’ way. He and his friends sit and drink and she knows they are up to something.
Danger lurks everywhere and she and Aunt Patience desperately need to escape
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
The opening note in the novel written by Daphne Du Maurier on the literary appeal of the locations in the book wrote:
“Jamaica Inn stands today, hospitable and kindly, a temperance house on the twenty-mile road between Bodmin and Launceston.”
She then goes on to say that she has reimagined it as it might have been over 120 years previously and says that although the locations are real, events and characters are fictional. But a land so inspired and so evocatively portrayed in this novel opens up on each and every page. Daphne Di Maurier’s novel is Cornwall and Cornwall is Daphne Du Maurier country.
The novel opens when Mary us travelling to Jamaica In by stagecoach. The wind and rain along the Launceston Road on the way to Bodmin Moor is fierce and wild. This is raw, weather beaten land and a tough existence for Mary and those who live in the dark and mysterious Jamaica Inn. As she nears the inn, she hears all sorts of dark tales about the place and so the sense of foreboding is strong.
Bodmin Moor in Cornwall is evoked in stunning, dark gothic style – Her uncle is the landlord of this godforsaken place, an inn with very few customers and some shady strangers hanging around. The inn and its people are poverty personified, dark and cold, brooding and unwelcoming. Something very shady is going on here.
This novel as well as capturing the raw allure of Bodmin Moor, looks at the history and culture of the Cornish area too.
Streetview Maps
Jamaica Inn
Jamaica Inn
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