Day Ten

4/10

The Book: Jamaica Inn by Daphne DuMaurier

ISBN: 978-0-380-72539-7

Suggested By: A Fellow Graduate Student

Where: Home

When: 2:30-3:20p

Music: None

Company: Alone

Pages:183- 302 (119)

The Lead In: I will finish this book today. I don’t care that it will eat up all my free time before work, it will be done.

The 411 on the 55: Mary sneaks away while the men are luring the ship into the coast, but is caught and beaten. The ship wrecks and the men loot until dawn. With first light, they realize they will be caught this time (why isn’t really well-explained) and they all begin to freak out. Mary and her uncle get back to the Inn and prepare for the coming law, while her uncle hints at some higher power that was giving him orders.

Her uncle decides he will escape that night, so Mary sneaks off to get the vicar but he is out, from there she goes to the sheriff, but he is out, headed to Jamaica Inn to get her uncle. She heads that way and, beating the posse, discovers her uncle and aunt dead. The vicar offers his place to rest, which she accepts.

The next morning, the vicar spills the beans and implicates himself as the mastermind and murderer of her aunt and uncle. He is splitting town and taking her with him. They are almost out of the area when the fog rolls in and they have to stop. During the night, Jem and another group of men catch up and kill the vicar. The last chapter wraps up with Jem taking Mary into his cart to ride the country and live like gypsies. 

The 20/20: I hated it. It was bad, predictable and typical of its genre. This calls into question the entire idea of a reading list based off other people’s tastes. If this is what other people read, why am I wasting my time?

Line of the Day: “Mary knew this, too, but she had not lost her fear, like the spider.” pg 246

The Fact on the Fiction: “As a young child Daphne had read avidly boys adventure stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and she clearly wanted to write an adventure story in that style. The storyline itself was brewed from an outing that had taken place some years previously when Daphne and her friend Foy Quiller Couch (daughter of the famous writer and scholar Sir Arthur Quiller Couch) were staying at Jamaica Inn and went riding on Bodmin Moor. They were lost in bad weather conditions and apparently sheltered for some time in a derelict cottage on the moor but were eventually led back to Jamaica Inn by their horses. During that stay at Jamaica Inn Daphne also met and talked to the parson from the nearby church at Altarnun.” Dumaurier.org