Has Bridget Jones really lost her way?
Life throws a few curves at 50-something
Holding court at a charity gala, there was a 50-something blond terrific-looking woman, accompanied by a younger, deeply attractive man. It was a scene that could have provided the opening of the latest instalment of Bridget Jones’s diary, in which the perennial singleton hits her 50s and takes up with a boy toy — but in fact, it was Jones’s creator, Helen Fielding.
After nearly a decade away, Fielding is back in the spotlight, with her third Bridget novel, Mad About the Boy. Fielding’s appalled followers have learned Bridget is back, but with three crucial differences — she’s a 50-something, she has two children and she’s a widow. The hero of her first two books, Mark Darcy, has died.
Of course, much remains the same: Bridget’s ability to cause chaos; her addiction to self-help books (French Children Don’t Throw Food replacing Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus); drinking too much; nicotine addiction (even if it’s now gum rather than cigarettes); and dealing with bad boy Daniel Cleaver’s sexual demands.
But has Fielding’s own life affected her fictional creation? She has always maintained her hapless singleton is not autobiographical. She had originally been asked by a newspaper executive to write a first-person column about the life of a 30-something single woman, but finding it too embarrassing, created a fictional persona.
It was a hit. For women, shock recognition accompanied every week’s instalment as Bridget laid bare the 1990s scene — writing about singletons, Smug Marrieds and “emotional f — wittage.”
Yet if not totally autobiographical, Fielding undoubtedly drew on her own experiences to create Bridget — as she had done with her previous novel Cause Celeb, which satirized her experiences of celebrity aid work and Comic Relief. And, intriguingly, it seems the lives of Fielding and Jones still collide.
Both have two children — Fielding, 55, has a nine-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter — while Bridget has the slightly younger Billy and Mabel.
Unlike Bridget, Fielding never married — her engagement to Kevin Curran, a TV executive on The Simpsons, with whom she had two children, broke up in 2009. She returned to the U.K., where she found herself a singleton again, not unlike Bridget’s new status as a widow.
Yet after more than a decade since the last Bridget Jones novel and seven years since the columns made a brief return in The Independent (when Bridget had a baby son by Daniel Cleaver), fans are asking if Bridget herself has lost her way.
Fielding certainly agonized about whether to revive the character whose diaries became a popular expression of ’90s angst. “I got all self-conscious,” Fielding said earlier this year. I didn’t want to just churn out another one. I really care about Bridget, about her as a character and about her integrity.”
Fielding’s success in the 1990s meant Bridget Jones came to define the Chick Lit phenomenon — but as a result many missed the satire that pervaded her books. Now Bridget returns to a crowded marketplace in women’s fiction. Her gags about Twitter mishaps, perfect school mothers and playdates are already out there.
So clearly something dramatic was called for — although few expected the death of Darcy. Making Bridget a widow isn’t the end of a franchise, as some tweeters have suggested.
John Sutherland, professor of literature at University College London, has suggested widowhood is an underexplored area in literature — and with an aging demographic, she may have again hit on an emerging trend ahead of her time.
But for many readers of these initial extracts, the problem is that Bridget doesn’t seem to have grown up despite the seismic changes — motherhood, widowhood — that her creator has bestowed on her. Maybe Fielding has confused Darcy’s declaration that he loved her “just the way you are” with “stay the way you are.”