Her mother’s dying request takes Mary Yellan on a sad journey across the bleak moorland of Cornwall to reach Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. With the coachman’s warning echoing in her memory, Mary arrives at a dismal place to find Patience a changed woman, cowering from her overbearing husband, Joss Merlyn.
Affected by the inn’s brooding power, Mary is thwarted in her intention to reform her aunt,and unwillingly drawn into the dark deeds of Joss and his accomplices. And, as she struggles with events beyond her control, Mary is further thrown by her feelings for a man she dare not trust...
A huge success on first publication, Jamaica Inn is a dark and intriguing gothic tale that will remind readers of two other great classics,lane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Jamaica Inn opens with echoes of Dracula: a carriage rattling through a desolate landscape and wild weather to a place where even the locals won t go, so ferocious is its reputation. Inside rides Mary Yellan, newly orphaned and en route from the tame farmland of.the Helford area to the rainswept moors of eighteenth-century Cornwall and the married home of her aunt, a woman once known for her rich curls and girlish laughter. We are in the territory 9f the gothic novel, but one with an undercurrent of modern sensibility.
Mary’s destination, Jamaica Inn, stands dark and forbidding at the top of the moor. It is the house from hell. At night the sign outside twists in the wind like a human body on a gibbet.Inside, the place reeks of neglect, drink and male violence. The lovely giggling Aunt Patience is now a gaunt, shaky wreck, her spirit destroyed by abuse, and her husband, Joss Merlyn, is a monster: physically overwhelming, lumbering, violent and drunk. By the end of the first day, as the light bleeds away and Mary barricades herself in her miserable little room, a pact has been made with the reader. This is going to be a journey into darkness, and it’s going to deliver both violence and sensation.
