☀ You can borrow and read Bridget Jones’s Diary free below. ☀
Bridget Jones’s Diary shares one year in the life of a 30ish London working girl. Her love life is her biggest obsession — and she will have two, very different, boyfriends to keep her life interesting this year — but she also obsesses about her weight, her vices (alcohol and cigarettes), and her career. She leans on a large cast of memorable family and friends for advice and support. And she writes about everything in her life in a way likely to leave you laughing.
a modern-day Pride and Prejudice
The book is based roughly on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and is drawn from author Helen Fielding*‘s columns in two British newspapers with the additional help of journalist Charles Leadbeater.
In this excerpt, Bridget’s about to go out with her incredibly handsome and charming boss (think Hugh Grant, as in the movie) for the first time.
Midnight. Ugh. Completely exhausted. Surely it is not normal to be revising for a date as if it were a job interview? Suspect Daniel’s enormously well read brain may turn out to be something of a nuisance if things develop. Maybe I should have fallen for someone younger and mindless who would cook for me & wash all my clothes and agree with everything I say. Since leaving work I have nearly slipped a disc, wheezing through a step aerobics class, scratched my naked body for seven minutes with a stiff brush; cleaned the flat; filled the fridge, plucked my eyebrows, skimmed the papers and the Ultimate Sex Guide, put the washing in and waxed my own legs, since it was too late to book an appointment. Ended up kneeling on a towel trying to pull off a wax strip firmly stuck to the back of my calf while watching Newsnight in an effort to drum up some interesting opinions about things. My back hurts, my head aches and my legs are bright red and covered in lumps of wax.
Wise people will say Daniel should like me just as I am, but I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can’t take the pressure. I am going to cancel and spend the evening eating doughnuts in a cardigan with egg on it.
Of course, Bridget does go out with him, and, of course, joy, misery, uncertainty, drama, the whole gamut. And the whole book is like that — here are some random entries:
SUNDAY 5 MARCH. 8 a.m. Ugh. Wish was dead. Am never, ever going to drink again for the rest of life.
MONDAY 6 MARCH. 11 a.m. Office. Completely exhausted. Last night was just lying in nice hot bath with some Geranium essential oil and a vodka and tonic when the doorbell rang. It was my mother, on the doorstep in floods of tears. It took me some time to establish what the matter was as she flopped all over the kitchen, breaking into ever louder outbursts of tears and saying she didn’t want to talk about it, until I began to wonder if her self-perpetuating sexual power surge had collapsed like a house of cards, with Dad, Julio and the tax man losing interest simultaneously.
MONDAY 6 MARCH. Can officially confirm that the way to a man’s heart these days is not through beauty, food, sex or alluringness of character, but merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.
TUESDAY 7 MARCH. 9 a.m. Aargh. How can I have put on 3 lbs. since the middle of the night? I was 130 when I went to bed, 128 at 4 a.m. and 131 when I got up.
It goes on like this for a year, a clever and entertaining look inside the mind of a lovely but rather at-sea woman and her chaotic life. Fun that she gets to do it, and you can enjoy it from a bit of a safe distance.
borrow or buy Bridget Jones’s Diary
You can borrow and read the ebook Bridget Jones’s Diary free via the nonprofit Internet Archive or buy* it from Amazon.
*As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
