Jamaica Inn is a real building which, as Du Maurier notes in her introductory note here, stood in her own time (and still does) on Cornwall's Bodmin Moor. The old inn caught the imagination of the young author, and she proceeded to spin a tale, envisioning it "as it might have been over a hundred and twenty years ago." (Since she wrote those words in 1935, that puts the setting of the novel somewhat before 1815; the date is never given in the text itself.) And what a tale it is, complete with sm More...

Nobody does Gothic like Daphne du Maurier. A decrepit inn without guests, wild moors, sinister fogs, smugglers, shipwrecks, a dashing horse thief, an albino vicar, and a murder mystery - all of the ingredients are there when orphaned Mary Yellan arrives at Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt who is married to a threatening man with secrets to hide.



The plot may seem over-the-top, but du Maurier excels in this genre, carefully laying the groundwork for a creepy, foreboding atmosphere. Instead of gi More...

This rancid mess is supposed to be a classic?! The attempt at 19th century prose falls flat..."like a dead thing." Good god. It has all the writerly skill of a romance novel, and a boring one at that. For its time, perhaps it was thrilling...NO!...No, I will not defend it. The "what's going on behind the scenes?!" tension is teased out to beyond caring. The characterizations are hackneyed. (Aunt Patience, the long-suffering wife? Come on already...) Du Maurier came from an almost aristocraticall More...

(4.5) A spooky, gothic tale perfect for a stormy October night. "Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us." Why I have waited so many years to read more of Du Maurier's books I'll never know, but there are definitely more of hers in my immediate reading future!

It's early 19C in Southern Cornwall and Mary Yellen's dying mother asks her to sell the family farm and join her Aunt Patience and her husband at Jamaica Inn in More...

This is another really dark piece of literature, right up my alley. If you like 'Wuthering Heights', I promise you that you'll love this book. Don't let the purple cover and pink, script letters turn you off!

Poor Mary has no idea what she's getting in to when she goes to live with her aunt and uncle! This book has murder, smugglers, deception, and a quiet romantic thread. It had me from page 1!

An amazing, perfect story; gripping from beginning to end. Daphne Du Maurier is a true story-teller with a wonderful talent for description; effortlessly and poetically describing scenes so simply and succinctly. I often felt as if I was right there; everything seemed so real: the country, the characters, the setting. I also felt such a deep sense of familiarity with the story or a connection: as if I'd either read the book before or lived it. Mary was a heroine in my eyes from the beginning: th More...

I was really worried that Jamaica Inn was going to be a mediocre grand finale in my love affair with Daphne du Maurier. So many reviewers said it fell flat, was one dimensional, or simply put; was nowhere near as good as Rebecca (...I feel like I have heard that somewhere before!). I often wonder how much of a novel being a success or failure is up to the reader personally and how much we understand and connect with the characters (or not) in a story really simply depends on what we have lived a More...

I have to say, this book by Daphne du Maurier is a little underwhelming.

The writing is, as expected, gorgeous. Just like in Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, it is very atmospheric. There is, no doubt, an air of Emily and Charlotte Bronte's style about it. Considering that I am a huge fan of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, that's a big plus. Du Maurier is also very skillful at building suspense. A feeling of dread and foreboding is maintained throughout the novel making it an intense reading More...

No need to visit the benign Jamaica Inn on England's southern shore, you've had the experience of the perpetually isolative, foreboding, and murderously Gothic Inn between the covers of Daphne du Maurier's suspenseful classic.

The author's hauntingly descriptive passages of the forbidding house on the 20 mile stretch between Bodmin and Launceston, surrounded by the unforgiving moors will transport you there. You'll know immediately that this is another time, and these inhabitants of the Cornish c More...

Fab read! We read this as our book club read. Very romantic & swashbuckling. Set in Cornwall, I love the descriptions of the sweltering hot summer (ache after that!) the trees dripping with leaves, the summer flowers and birds, makes you want to go there! Love the feisty main character, she is gutsy, not your average wishy washy romantic heroine! Love all the pirates, makes it sound very (unbelievably) romantic & noble :) good read, recommend!
Oops this review is for Frenchman's Creek! Ja More...

A true gothic tale on the moors - and completely enjoyable. When Mary Yellan's mother dies there's nothing left but for her to move in with her Aunt Patience and her husband, the landlord of Jamaica Inn. Even before she steps foot in the place Mary learns that people fear it, won't go near it, and think she should stay the heck away from it. Her first night there pretty much confirms all of that. The landlord is a drunken bully. There's a boarded up room at the end of the corridor. A crowd of ne More...

OMG, this book is so so so so so boring. If I had not been reading it for a book challenge, I'd have stopped this one after the first chapter. It is so wordy, so descriptive and every time the action starts to move along, Mary, the protagonist, has to think off on some tangent and imagine this and that while the plot stalls. Too much of the brook burbling or the rain mizzling or the blackness of the moors or the people are like the rocks. After the first description, I don't need to read it anot More...

I don't understand my reaction to this book.

I loved Rebecca, it was beautifully and thoughtfully written, but Jamaica Inn leaves me cold and it shouldn't. I really didn't want it to. It has all of the ingredients of a dark and exciting adventure and yet...it is populated by caricatures, larger than life and impossible to beleive in. The albino priest, the drunken landlord and his colourless wife...the smugglers, the cliches of the boggy more. No no no.
Admittedly it was a less mature novel than R More...

I felt like picking up a classic that would be easy to read, and Daphne du Maurier seemed like the right choice. I had never seen the movie, so the story was new to me and I enjoyed the suspense.
Formally, I admire the way this book has an economy of characters and other elements in order to focus on the development of the plot. Jamaica Inn, the sea, the cliffs and the moors are of vital importance, the place is a character here too, but if there are perhaps too many descriptions, to compensate w More...

Borrowed this book from fellow author L K Jay as we were visiting Jamaica Inn and wanted the experience to be even more significant for us. Usually we hesitate at reading the 'classics' because we mostly end up hating them. Wuthering Heights springs to mind. But we were determined to finish this before our trip. We read it in a week, which is really good for us. And despite our trepidation, we loved it. Mary Yellan is an amazing character. She's feisty, gutsy and stands up for herself. She's not More...

I read this book because I wanted to try something new from what I usually read, and Mrs Jones the librarian recommended me this. I found myself spellbound by this amazing book at the very first page. This miraculous book tells the tale of 23-year-old Mary Yellan, whom by her mother's dying wish went unto a journey to Jamaica Inn to find her aunt Patience. Upon arrival, she was startled to find her once pretty and sunny aunt a changed woman. Affected by the Inn's brooding power, she found hersel More...

Although it isn't listed, I read the ereader version of the book.

Actually a 3.75 for me. I wasn’t completely enchanted with the goings on of Jamaica Inn.

Although this was not Ms. Du Marnier’s most famous work it should not be over looked. It has held up surprisingly well for a story written in 1936. By today’s standards it is wordy and over-descriptive leaving the readers mind to wander. It was a also bit jarring to keep seeing the characters first and surnames being utilized. It was another m More...

wow what a wonderful week of commutes I have had with Mary Yellen and co. So wonderful in fact, that I missed my tube stop and ended up in Manor House, this is only the 2nd book to ever do that, so of course my review will be favourable.

I do love Daphne Du Maurier, for me she embodies the perfect author with her combination of beautifully written prose and meticulously planned plots. I like books that make me think, but really I read for escape and entertainment so a good storyline is integral t More...

I recently came across this book in a box of books. A day or two before it came up in conversation and I realized it was the only one I recalled in some detail from a period of reading an entire series of beautifully bound "great books" at a friend's house. However, on thing I forgot was the author: du Maurier, until I saw it again. In the years since, I have collected two other books of his that I have made a point to read based on how I came across the titles in reference, etc. That's all very More...

Not much to say about this one. All in all, it's a gothic novel, and a well written one. I just don't particularly like gothic novels. The genre is so formulaic that even listing the cliches would be a redundancy. People read gothic because they are looking for a formulaic story, and the more the story includes the traditional gothic elements the better it works.

If you want a story of a young self-insertion girl in distressed circumstances sent to live with people she doesn't know very well in a More...

Bem, eu gostei do livro. Foi muito menos dramático do que Rebecca, o anterior livro que li da autora.

No entanto, gostei mais do Rebecca e passo a explicar porquê. Apesar de este livro ter uma carga de suspense maior, também as cartas foram logo postas na mesa, não houve de facto ali nenhum mistério.

Já sabíamos de antemão que o tio Joss era um malandro que fazia contrabando. O facto de ele ser um violento e que o facto de amar a bebida também não ajudou a apanhar tão bem o gosto pela história.

Se More...

Warning: contains spoilers
Jamaica Inn is probably my favorite of all the Du Maurier books I have read so far. Whenever I say this to a hardened fan the response I usually
receive is that J.I is quite good but nowhere near as absorbing or well written as Rebecca. In some respects I understand this response and I am happy to admit that J.I is less mature and certainly not as clever or insightful as Rebecca, but I also believe this to be a somewhat unfair comparison. To start with this book was wri More...

Jamaica Inn is a dark, grim, yet exciting Gothic; after Rebecca, it's one of du Maurier's best-known books. (I thought I hadn't read it before, but after the ease which with I guessed most of the plot, I think I probably have, years ago.) After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan goes to live with her aunt and uncle, who keep Jamaica Inn, avoided by respectable travelers and shadowed in mystery. When Mary discovers the awful doings of her uncle and his band of followers, she is torn between try More...

This edition has loads of typos, so my main advice is get a different one. How is that even possible with such an old book? (Unless they left in the original typos?) The cover is misleading too; the house is not on a cliff, nor is there much romance as the silly swirly letters suggest; it's mostly a mystery with a lot of violence.

It started out really slow then ramped up a lot, so if you read it, give it a minute. Without giving away too much, it ended up being pretty interesting, and I guess th More...

Another fantastic book from du Maurier who, from the 3 books of hers that I've read to date (this, Rebecca, and Frenchman's Creek), seems incapable of writing anything less than brilliant. Master storyteller is, in her case, an extremely well deserved plaudit.

Mary Yellan, newly orphaned, comes to live with her Aunt & Uncle at Jamaica Inn, a place so forbidding that even the locals avoid it. Finding her Uncle a mean, brutal, drunken bully and her Aunt a shadow of her former self, Mary decides More...

Oh yes, good old Bodmin Moor! I have fond memories of that landscape but I, too, prefer the green valleys of Halford and Helston.

I am fascinated by the history of maritime crime in Cornwall. Victorian England teaching civilisation to the whole Empire following the teachings of Macaulay, marching to the beat of Kipling's anthem and some of the most heinous organised hunting of human beings being carried out in its own backwaters. These crimes would make a Maori warrior shudder, a Congolese head- More...

Had this been the first Daphne du Maurier novel I ever read, I may not have ever picked up Rebecca or House on the Strand. The plot was kind of contrived to begin with: A young woman, Mary's promise to her dying mother was to join her aunt, whom she vaguely remembered, at her inn on a cornish moor. The aunt she remembered as a young, vivacious lady, is a much older, diminished a sack full of anxiety. Upon meeting her aunt's husband, the keeper of the inn, she quickly sees the cause of this chang More...

Ora bem, foi com curiosidade que me “aventurei” neste livro da falecida Daphne du Maurier depois de ler tantas críticas positivas à sua obra mais conhecida, Rebecca, e ainda não tive oportunidade de ler.
A Pousada da Jamaica é uma história de suspense e com algum romance misturado, especialmente no fim da história, sobre Mary Yellan que depois da morte da sua mãe vai viver com os seus tios na tal Pousada da Jamaica. Mal ela sabe que este lugar é um antro de contrabando e de supostas mortes horre More...

What is it about tales of smugglers, wreakers and pirates that is so deliciously compelling? Even now, in a landlocked city in the 21st century, these kinds of tales are able to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. I can remember being utterly thrilled by the Kipling’s poem The Smugglers Song when I first came across it in primary school – it somehow had the same exciting quality about that those old tales of smugglers always have. Reading those lines now after all these years -it seems prett More...