If you like Notes in the Margin, please recommend it to a friend by clicking on this button:

Novels The Loving Spirit (1931) I'll Never Be Young Again (1932) The Progress of Julius (1933) Jamaica Inn (1936) Rebecca (1938) Frenchman's Creek (1941) Hungry Hill (1943) The Parasites (1949) My Cousin Rachel (1951) Mary Anne (1954) The King's General (1954) The Scapegoat (1957) (With Arthur Quiller-Couch) Castle d'Or(1962) The Glass-Blowers (1963) The Flight of the Falcon (1965) The House on the Strand (1969) Rule Britannia (1972) Short Stories Come Wind, Come Weather (1940) The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (1952); republished as Kiss Me Again, Stranger: A Collection of Eight Stories, Long and Short (1953) and as The Birds, and Other Stories (1977) The Breaking Point (1959); republished as The Blue Lenses, and Other Stories (1970) Early Stories (1959) The Treasury of du Maurier Short Stories (1960) Don't Look Now (1971) Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories (1976) The Rendezvous and Other Stories (1980)

Daphne du Maurier was born in London on May 13, 1907. She was the daughter of Gerald (an actor) and Muriel (an actress) du Maurier. She married a military man, Maj. Frederick Arthur Browning – who was known as "Tommy" to his family and as "Boy" to his friends – on July 19, 1932. They had three children. The family moved several times as Browning was transferred to various military posts, but Daphne du Maurier lived in Cornwall for 40 years, 25 of them at the 17th century house Menabilly, which was the model for Manderley in duMaurier’s best known work, Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier died on April 19, 1989, in Cornwall.

Du Maurier wrote both short stories and novels. Critics agree that she produced two kinds of works: historical romance and the gothic or psychological thriller. She won the National Book Award in 1938 for Rebecca. Many of her works were adapted for film, most notably Rebecca, The Birds, Frenchman’s Creek, Jamaica Inn, and My Cousin Rachel.

One of my book groups chose to read Jamaica Inn, and most people were disappointed in it. If you haven’t read any of Daphne du Maurier’s works, better starting places would be her masterpiece, Rebecca (of course), The House on the Strand, or My Cousin Rachel.

Jamaica Inn (1936)
Rpt. Avon, 302 pages, $6.99 paperback, ISBN 0-380-72539-8

Set in about 1810, Jamaica Inn portrays the moors of Cornwall where Daphne du Maurier spent much of her life. The book opens with Mary Yellan riding in a coach. We soon learn that Mary, age 23, grew up on a farm in Helford. After Mary’s father died, she and her mother continued to work the farm. But now Mary’s mother has also died, and Mary cannot work the farm alone. Before dying, Mrs. Yellan made Mary promise that she would go live with her sister, Mary’s Aunt Patience. Aunt Patience has recently married an innkeeper, Joss Merlyn, whom Mary has never met. Mary is looking forward to a reunion with her aunt, whom she remembers as pleasant and full of fun. But when the coachman hears of her destination, Jamaica Inn, he warns her that respectable people never stop at Jamaica Inn anymore.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 191: British Novelists Between the Wars (ed. George M. Johnson, Gale Group, 1998, pp. 85-94) says: “Cornwall, a region of mystery and superstition, the home of legendary figures such as King Arthur and Tristan and Iseult, is a landscape easily made Gothic; it is the home, as well, of pirates both fictional and historical, with a coastline that has been responsible for innumerable shipwrecks." Du Maurier wastes no time in using this setting for gothic effect to create an image of Jamaica Inn as an isolated, eerie, malevolent place:

On either side of the road the country stretched interminable into space. No trees, no lane, no cluster of cottages or hamlet, but mile upon mile of bleak moorland, dark and untraversed, rolling like a desert land to some unseen horizon. No human being could live in this wasted country, thought Mary, and remain like other people; the very children would be born twisted, like the blackened shrubs of broom, bent by the force of a wind that never ceased, blow as it would from east and west, from north and south. Their minds would be twisted, too, their thoughts evil, dwelling as they must amidst marshland and granite, harsh heather and crumbling stone (19).

When Mary reaches the inn and stumbles upon her uncle, who has grown up on the moors, she learns that her fears were correct: Joss Merlyn is rude, crude, overbearing, and threatening. But what astonishes Mary the most is her Aunt Patience, who has morphed from a cheerful, pleasant woman into a hand-wringing old crone afraid of her own shadow.

However, Mary is a spunky, self-reliant woman, and she determines to endure her new life at Jamaica Inn and to bring her aunt back round to her old self. (Mary never seems to realize that being married to a man like Joss Merlyn would do that to a woman.) But then Mary meets Joss’s younger brother, Jem Merlyn:

He lacked tenderness; he was rude; and he had more than a streak of cruelty in him; he was a thief and a liar. He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him. Nature cared nothing for prejudice. Men and women were like the animals on the farm at Helford, she supposed; there was a common law attraction for all living things [. . .] This was no choice made with the mind. Animals did not reason, neither did the birds in the air. Mary was no hypocrite; she was bred to the soil, and she had lived too long with birds and beasts, had watched them mate, and bear their young, and die. There was precious little romance in nature, and she would not look for it in her own life (139-140).

And just like that Mary is smitten. Against her better judgment – and because of pure animal attraction -- she falls for Jem Merlyn:

No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time (141).

There are several more plot turns that continue the gothic story, but at this point the reader cannot help but hold out little hope for Mary Yellan’s future. If she’s attracted to Jem Merlyn, will she end up just like her Aunt Patience: in love with a man she also loathes, loathing herself for loving him, but unable to do anything different? And what has happened to the determined, self-reliant woman of the first part of the novel? I read this novel with an online book group, and most other members were as disappointed in it as I was because of the inconsistent characterization of Mary Yellan.

 

| Discussion Notes | Fiction Notes | Nonfiction Notes | Reference Notes |  | Glossary Notes | Personal Notes | Best Books List | What's New | Home |