Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier

Jamaica Inn is a thriller novel by Du Maurier, set in Cornwall in the early years of the 19th century. The heroine, Mary Yellan, comes to the inn to live when her mother who had a farm dies. Mary is a strong girl used to farm work and has never taken much interest in young men. She would like to have her own farm and run it, with her moter as housekeeper, but her mother dies some years after her father's death, and tells Mary to go to Jamaica Inn, in another wilder part of Cornwall, where her Aunt Patience lives. Patience is a pretty rather silly woman, who married some years earlier and moved away and has rarely seen her sister, Mrs Yellan for years. Mrs Yellan however wants her daughter to be safely with relatives who will look after her. So Mary sets out to go to the Inn and finds that it is on a road miles from any settlement. The people on the coach tell her that the inn is not frequented by respectable people nowadays. She becomes nervous and when she gets to the Inn, it seems far from comfortable. Her aunt Patience is not now the pretty lively litlte woman she used to be, but a frightened woman, older than her years. Patience tells Mary that she will have to get on with her husband, Joss Merlyn, who is the owner of the inn and that he has a hot temper and expects her to work for him. Mary is willing to work but she wonders why Patience is so scared of her husband and why there are no rooms for hire at the business. Joss Merlyn proves to be a big gigantic man, rough and savage in his manners, and she can see then why Patience is afraid of him. He mocks Mary, and laughs at his wife.. who tries to tell her niece that the inn does have people coming in to drink and that the local squire comes in at times. He tells Mary that she will have to obey him, and when he tells her to go to bed and lock herself in, she has to do this.