When Mary Yellan, a farmer's daughter from Helford, obeyed her
mother's dying wish and went to live with her aunt near Bodmin,
she had no idea that her attractive, laughing relative was married to
the landlord of Jamaica Inn, miles from anywhere on Bodmin Moor.
As the coachman warned her: 'Respectable folk don't go to Jamaica
any more'. And as her evil giant of an uncle soon told her, after a
few glasses of brandy: 'I'm not drunk enough to tell you why I live
in this God-forgotten spot, and why I'm the landlord of Jamaica
Inn.'
In her first famous novel Daphne du Maurier transferred the
world of the Bronte's to Cornwall in the early nineteenth century. In
the dark events along the Cornish coast, in the ugly brutality of Joss
Merlyn, and in the enigmatic character of his brother Jem, tha
reader gets an exciting foretaste of her next novel, Rebecca.
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