Bridget Jones

About Bridget Jones

Bridget Jones is a fictional columnist, created by English writer Helen Fielding for her Bridget Jones's Diary column in The Independent in 1995. The column chronicled Bridget Jones's life as a thirtysomething single woman living in London, surrounded by a surrogate "urban family" of friends as she tries to make sense of life and love in the 1990s. The column lampooned the obsession of women with women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan and wider societal trends in Britain at the time. Helen Fielding published the novelisation of the column in 1996, followed by a sequel in 1999 called Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Both novels were adapted for the big screen in 2001 and 2004, starring Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones, and Hugh Grant and Colin Firth as the men in her life, Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy. After Fielding had ceased to work for The Daily Telegraph in late 1998, the feature began again in The Independent on August 4, 2005.

Bridget Jones is a single, thirty three year old woman who has a monotonous life. She has some bad habits - smoking and drinking too much - but she annually writes her New Year's resolutions in her diary, determined to stop smoking, drink no more than fourteen alcohol units a week, and eat more pulses. In the two novels and screen adaptations, Bridget's mother is bored with her life as a housewife in the country and leaves Bridget's father. Bridget repeatedly flirts with her boss, Daniel Cleaver, whom she later peceives as a "fuckwit". A successful barrister named Mark Darcy also keeps popping into Bridget's life, being extremely awkward, and sometimes coming off a bit rude. After Bridget and Mark reach an understanding of each other and find a sort of happiness together, she gains some self-esteem and cuts down on her cigarette consume. However, Bridget's obsession with self-help books plus several misunderstandings cannot keep the couple together forever.

In the mid-nineties, Charles Leadbeater, at the time the features editor of the English newspaper The Independent, offered Helen Fielding, then a journalist on The Independent on Sunday, a weekly column about urban life in London designed to appeal to young professional women. Fielding accepted and Bridget Jones was born on 28 February 1995. The instantaneous popularity of the columns led to publication of the first book, Bridget Jones's Diary, in 1996.