First edition. Original blue cloth with dark blue titles. Inscribed on the front endpaper "For Foy - / Christmas 1935 / from Daphne". A good copy (with boards rather faded and marked, lacking dustwrapper) with a wonderful association.

The inspiration behind the story of Jamaica Inn was two fold.
The first being Du Maurier's love of adventure stories. From a young age she had adored Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and she longed to write a tale of smuggling and intrigue.
The second stemming from an overnight stay at a hostel on Bodmin Moor, namely the eponymous, Jamaica Inn, which provided her with the perfect setting for Cornish smugglers to operate. Du Maurier visited the inn with her close friend Foy Quiller-Couch, daughter of Arthur Quiller-Couch, on a dark and wintery night. They took horses and rode over Bodmin Moor, which Du Maurier described as, "a desolate, fog-bound and sometimes frightening place". The pair became lost and allegedly sheltered for sometime in a derelict cottage before their horses led them back to Jamaica Inn.
"It was a cold grey day in late November. The weather had changed overnight, when a backing wind brought a granite sky and... although it was only a little after two o'clock in the afternoon the pallor of a winter evening seemed to have closed upon the hills, cloaking them in mist." So begins the novel.
The hostel was immortalised by Du Maurier's novel and to this day remains open to visitors on the bleak and foggy moor. One room is full of Du Maurier memorabilia, including the author's writing desk and a bowl of her favourite glacier mints.
The book has been filmed on numerous occasions, most famously by Alfred Hitchcock in 1939 and the BBC have recently announced a new adaptation of the novel planned for 2014.

PROVENANCE: From the library of Foy Quiller-Couch, daughter of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and close friend of Du Maurier. It was with Foy that Du Maurier first visited the real Jamaica Inn, which provided the setting for this novel.

Stock ID: 32115