The Bell Jar

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, a

Chapter Two

I wouldn't have missed Lenny's place for anything. It was built exactly like the inside of a ranch, only in the middle of a New York apartment house. He'd had a few partitions knocked down to make th

Chapter Three

Arrayed on the Ladies' Day banquet table were yellow-green avocado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise, and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a cut-glass bo

Chapter Four

I don't know just why my successful evasion of chemistry should have floated into my mind there in Jay Cee's office. All the time she talked to me, I saw Mr Manzi standing on thin air in back of Jay

Chapter Five

At seven the next morning the telephone rang. Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep. I already had a telegram from Jay Cee stuck in my mirror, telling me not to bother to come into work b

Chapter Six

I had kept begging Buddy to show me some really interesting hospital sights, so one Friday I cut all my classes and came down for a long week-end and he gave me the works. I started out by dressing i

Chapter Seven

Of course, Constantin was much too short, but in his own way he was handsome, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes and a lively, challenging expression. He could almost have been an American, he w

Chapter Eight

Mr Willard drove me up to the Adirondacks. It was the day after Christmas and a grey sky bellied over us, fat with snow. I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day afte

Chapter Nine

'I'm so glad they're going to die.' Hilda arched her cat-limbs in a yawn, buried her head in her arms on the conference table and went back to sleep. A wisp of bilious green straw perched on her brow

Chapter Ten

The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian. I dropped the compact into my pocket-book and stared out of the train window. Like a colossal junkyard, the swamps and back lots of Connecticut flash

Chapter Eleven

Doctor Gordon's waiting-room was hushed and beige. The walls were beige, and the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. There were no mirrors or pictures, only certifica

Chapter Twelve

Doctor Gordon's private hospital crowned a grassy rise at the end of a long, secluded drive that had been whitened with broken quahog shells. The yellow clapboard walls of the large house, with its en

Chapter Thirteen

'Of course his mother killed him.' I looked at the mouth of the boy Jody had wanted me to meet. His lips were thick and pink and a baby face nestled under the silk of white-blond hair. His name was C

Chapter Fourteen

It was completely dark. I felt the darkness, but nothing else, and my head rose, feeling it, like the head of a worm. Someone was moaning. Then a great, hard weight smashed against my cheek like a st

Chapter Fifteen

Philomena Guinea's black Cadillac eased through the tight, five o'clock traffic like a ceremonial car. Soon it would cross one of the brief bridges that arched the Charles, and I would, without thinki

Chapter Sixteen

Joan's room, with its closet and bureau and table and chair and white blanket with the big blue C on it, was a mirror image of my own. It occurred to me that Joan, hearing where I was, had engaged a r

Chapter Seventeen

'You're a lucky girl today.' The young nurse cleared my breakfast tray away and left me wrapped in my white blanket like a passenger taking the sea air on the deck of a ship. 'Why am I lucky?' 'Wel

Chapter Eighteen

'Esther.' I woke out of a deep, drenched sleep, and the first thing I saw was Doctor Nolan's face swimming in front of me and saying, 'Esther, Esther.' I rubbed my eyes with an awkward hand. Behind

Chapter Nineteen

'I'm going to be a psychiatrist.' Joan spoke with her usual breathy enthusiasm. We were drinking apple cider in the Belsize lounge. 'Oh,' I said dryly, 'that's nice.' 'I've had a long talk with Doc

Chapter Twenty