Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier

It is very rare occasion to read a book and for it to deliver everything you wanted from it. Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier now has a permanent place on my bookshelf for life and I will be rereading it again and again.

Opening in a “cold grey day in late November” du Maurier selects her words carefully to set the mood for her coastal gothic tale; the coach Mary Yellan journeys in sways like a “drunken man”, while rain water drips down and smudges the leather seat like “dark-blue ink”. The first few sentences were enough to have me hooked, a piece of historical fiction built with the bricks and mortar of the period of its setting (the nineteenth -century), yet given an expertly modern finish. I turned back to see the book had been first published in 1936 and I could tell from the writing Daphne Du Maurier had in this book delivered a new form of expression in the genre.

Life is bleak in nineteenth century, especially for a woman with no friends or particularly sane family. In older classics I have read, set in the nineteenth century with a similar setup, often the hero cries, she prays, she is tormented, she walks for miles only to collapse in the arms of a man (very often a religious figure), she is pure and morally driven, and often after a few pages of this trial and anguish, I find her intensely annoying. Often, it’s not the hero’s end goal I find irritating but the words given to her by her author. Mary Yellan is quite possibly the character Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott tried to create, but couldn’t. She is on her way to being a woman of independence and free-thinking, a modern character, and that makes Daphne du Maurier my new #girlcrush.

The coastal landscape of Cornwall; its physical features, such as marshes, gullies, granite tors; its “clammy cold” temperatures; mist and fog, all are washed up for du Maurier to feast on and she places Mary Yellan in this plain, among the phantom wreckers, who light up corners in dark cliffs, joining the ranks of pirates and other devilish sea-people.

Jamaica Inn is a pleasure to read - for me anyway. It gave me a gothic story, set on the coast, with clear, yet captivating descriptions of the dark and violent world the hero finds herself in; there is a romance with a typical bad boy, whose nineteenth-century version of a motorcycle is a stolen horse; a thrilling page-turning plot which sucks you in quicker than a bog on a Cornish marsh, and the allure of an author’s words who knows how to write for their reader.