#book: jamaica inn

[haveyoureadthispoll]

Her mother's dying request obliges Mary Yellan to make a grim journey across bleak Cornish moorland to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience and her overbearing husband, Joss Merlyn. With the coachman's warning echoing in her mind and affected by the inn's brooding power, Mary is thwarted in her intention to help her aunt. She finds herself drawn unwillingly into the misdeeds of Joss and his accomplices, and even more disturbing are her feelings for a man she dare not trust . . . Jamaica Inn is a dark and gripping gothic tale that will remind readers of two other great classics, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights .

[yesterdaysprint]

Daphne Du Maurier with her father, Sir Reginald Du Maurier, Hampstead, 1925

[bellasbookclub]

Reccer Spotlight: G!

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Mexican Gothic

Jamaica Inn

The Monstrumologist

A River Enchanted

The Importance of Being Earnest

G tried to think of genre-ly diverse recs and they came out Oops, All Gothic (ok, except for the last two.) Full text available in their tab of the Bella’s Book Club Summer Reading ‘23 Reclist!

more info on BBC Summer Reading 2023

more Reccer Spotlights

[phaedraismyusername]

Hi hello I have been knee deep in a genre binge so here are some literary sci-fi books that deal with loneliness as a core theme

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Translated from French this book follows the youngest girl in a group of 40 women who are being kept in a cage underground in an unknown place, for unknown reasons, until one day they get the chance to escape triggering a search for answers and survival on a desolate surface.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is a very subtle dystopian story about a group of people who spend their childhoods at an extremely secretive english boarding school, the course of their relationships, and where they are at the end of their lives. There's a subtle feeling of wrongness from the first chapter and the author spends the rest of the novel very slowly revealing the reasons why.

Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma

The super short form pitch for this book is 'Fleabag if there was an option to yeet herself to another planet'. Iris is in a long term relationship with depression, kind of hates her pointless job, sometimes hates her family, and is generally overwhelmed by the weight of existence, when she hears about Nyx - earth's first space colony - and thinks that just maybe it could be the answer to all her problems.

Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon

When the population of a company sponsored colony finds out they have been designated a failure and the people are to be packed up and shipped off to another planet to try again, one little old lady decides that for the first time in her long life she's going to break the rules - she's going to stay and live her best life alone on the planet, and finally get some peace and quiet. What could go wrong?

Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

Skyward Inn is an odd little book set in a future where Earth has come into contact with an alien world that quickly surrendered to humanity. The story follows a small group of kind of unlikeable people who live behind the walls of the 'western protectorate' - a place in the moors that's decided to isolate itself and live like the old days with rudimentary technology for a simple life. Until strangers appear and things start to get... weird. Slower, stranger and with more body horror than you might expect.

[meowizard]

i love when there is. a castle or perhaps a dark marsh

[mzannthropy]

Mary Yellan and Jem Merlyn of Jamaica Inn are such a good gothic romance, but they don't seem to get a lot of love. Maybe they're not that well known, which is a shame!

[noughticalcrossings]

The Vicar of Altarnun

The night was fine; the dark clouds of the early evening had passed away and the sky was ablaze with stars. Mary sat beside Francis Davey on the high seat of the dog cart, wrapped in a greatcoat with a top collar of velvet. This was not the same horse that he had been riding when she met him on the moor; this was a big grey cob who, fresh from his sojourn in the stable, went like the wind. It was a strange exhilarating drive.

The wind blew in Mary‘s face, stinging her eyes. The climb from Altarnun had been slow at first, for the hill was steep, but now they were upon the high road, with their faces turned to Bodmin, the vicar pricked the cob with the whip, so that he laid his ears flat to his head and galloped like a mad thing.

His hoofs thundered on the hard white road, raising a cloud of dust, and Mary was flung against her companion. He made no effort to rein in his horse, and, glancing up at him, Mary saw that he was smiling. “Go on,” he said, “go on; you can go faster than this”; and his voice was low and excited, as though he were talking to himself. The effect was unnatural, a little startling, and Mary was aware of a feeling of discomfiture, as though he had betaken himself to another world and had forgotten her existence.

Seated where she was, she could observe him for the first time in profile, and she saw how clear-cut were his features, how prominent the thin nose; perhaps it was the peculiarity of nature, creating him white in the beginning, that made him different from any man she had ever seen before.

He looked like a bird. Crouched in his seat, with his black cape-coat blown out by the wind, his arms were like wings. He might be any age, and she could not place him at all. Then he smiled down at her, and was human again.

- Extract from Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

[claar-bookdragonwitch]

From Pigletboo

[historygirl]

[bunnythevampireslayer]

bold words from daphne du maurier

[readingaway]

Danielle Babbles About Books - Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

What made you want to read it? -

One of my semester projects during my MFA was doing a big presentation on (and then I was able to write a term paper on) du Maurier's The Birds and Other Stories. Since I loved Rebecca, I wanted to get more context of du Maurier's writing for this huge presentation I had to give, so I read as much of her work as I could in preparation for the presentation. Now du Maurier is on my unofficial and unwritten list of authors whose body of work I'm slowly reading.

(With this list which is not a list I try to read an author's works in publication order, excluding whichever works I started with, and I don't have to read them all.)

Who would you recommend this to? -

Lovers of bad boys and gothic romance.

What aspect or part do you think will stick with you longest? -

The unconventionality/ scandalousness of the ending.

What writing things did you pick up? -

Well I want to avoid the stereotyping and ableism in a certain aspect. I'd have to read the book again to get ideas for stuff I might want to adopt. I can definitely learn something about suspense from du Maurier.

What format did you read it in? -

Audiobook. I now own a physical copy because I want to re-read in the future and I just very much enjoyed it.

What parts or elements stood out to you most? -

The setting and the mood. This is a gothic romance and the setting both in time and place are cold, hard, and dismal. Everybody's bad except Mary and, fortunately for readers, Mary is still compelling/ not an angel. Or should I say it like, she's more like a Jane Eyre type of character, virtuous and determined to stay out of the crime around her and trying to be a good person and wanting a normal life or great romance but forced by circumstance to be a bit hard and unyielding and to get down in the muck.

If this was written a hundred or two hundred years earlier, Mary would've had to have been Pure and Delicate and etc, which as real qualities are all nice but these characters rarely work in fiction. Plus, the ending would've had to be different.

Other thoughts -

Cornwall is cold and wet and bleak in the winter, smuggling is a dangerous business, women's rights and money matter more than most modern people can comprehend. And horse thievery was a hanging offense.

[annelisreadingroom]

Throwback to a sunny winter day in Koszalin, Poland. I took a day trip there about two years ago.

[claireelizabethsblog]

~ March's Book(s) Reviewed ~

So.... March was the month of life catching up 😅

Unfortunately I only managed to read one book this month, it was a good one at least. But yes, I didn't have nearly enough time nor head space to dedicate to reading books this month as I would have liked. I was still reading every night, just unfortunately the novels took a bit of a back seat as I was reading a lot of academic papers and then countering those heavy intellectual readings with lots of comforting fanfictions of previously read books. Fingers crossed April will allow me to get back into the novels at my usual rate!

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

(302 pages)

I really liked this book. It was a fairly easy read, which was something necessary for this month, and the mystery element was fun and well done. Some of the wording and themes and characterisations were a little dated, but generally still a really enjoyable read.

I gave this book 4 stars ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

[prettypangolins]

"She ran away to Falmouth and went with the sailors." says the mother in warning Mary that a woman alone doesn't end up well. Doesn't sound so bad to me XD

[mzannthropy]

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier is so fucking good.

[rukialusia]

❅ don't let me go ❅ {Book Couples}