Jamaica Inn. DU MAURIER (Daphne).

First Edition. 8vo. [190 x 125 x 31 mm]. 351pp. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in dark blue in original yellow dust-wrappers printed in black and red (wrapper town with loss at head of spine, which is darkened, sides soiled).
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1936.

Occasional scattered foxing or spotting, including to the half-title and title, and the dust-wrapper has seen better days, but it is present and correct (with price 7/6) and unrestored. Previous owner's neat ink initials inside front cover.

Jamaica Inn was Daphne Du Maurier's fourth novel and her most successful work to date, selling more copies in three months than her previous works had sold in total. The atmospheric tale of eighteenth century smugglers was inspired by a visit to to the real Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor several years earlier. During her stay Daphne and a friend were lost on the moor in bad weather and forced to shelter in an abandoned cottage, before eventually finding their way back to the inn. Much of the novel was written away from Cornwall, at a time when she was struggling to adjust to her new role as an army wife. In her imagination Cornwall becomes a Gothic landscape and the familiar Gothic plot of a heroine under threat in a sinister edifice allowed her to explore themes of freedom and nonconformity. Jamaica Inn was influenced by Du Maurier's early reading of boys' adventure stories such as Treasure Island and her admiration for the Brontes' fiction, particularly Wuthering Heights. Combining elements of both, she created a work which has itself become a part of Cornish legend.

Stock no. ebc6125