The official Daphne du Maurier website, approved by her Estate
What Makes Literary Hotels so Fascinating?
Jamaica Inn
The Conversation is an online media outlet that publishes articles written by academics. The articles are written under a creative commons licence, which allows reuse without modification. It publishes a vast range of immensely interesting articles that, from time to time, cover subjects of particular interest to readers of the Daphne du Maurier website.
This week, one such article was published. It is called Checking in to a Fictional World: The Enduring Appeal of Literary Hotels, and it discusses several writers and their books set in, or featuring, a hotel or place to stay.
The author of the article is Rebecca Hutcheon, a research fellow at the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries at the University of South Wales.
She notes that part of what makes literary hotels so fascinating is that some are tied to writers' lives, others to the places where they worked, and some have become part of fictional worlds themselves.
Hotels are particularly adaptable settings for fiction. They bring strangers together in temporary communities, creating opportunities for encounters, misunderstandings and suspicion.
Rebecca's article is of particular interest to us because it includes a piece about Jamaica Inn. Daphne du Maurier wrote her novel, which has the same name as the Inn on Bodmin Moor, sometime after she had stayed at the Inn on more than one occasion. Her most famous visit was with her friend Foy Quiller-Couch, when they became lost on the Moor while out riding.
There is no doubt that the fame of Jamaica Inn and many of the myths that surround it have been increased enormously because of Daphne du Maurier's novel, much in the way that 221B Baker Street is forever remembered as the home address of Sherlock Holmes despite him being a fictional character.
This is a fascinating article that we highly recommend you read. Here is the link: https://theconversation.com/checking-in-to-a-fictional-world-the-enduring-appeal-of-literary-hotels-294171
November 2026.