Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary, the hit movie based on a novel by Helen Fielding.
Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary, the hit movie based on a novel by Helen Fielding.
Upon realising there’s a fourth Bridget Jones movie coming in 2025, and that it’s been more than a quarter of a century since her diary became a sensation, staffers at the Washington Post’s Book World decided it was time to read (or reread) Helen Fielding’s novel to see how (or if) Bridget has stood the test of time.
Nora Krug: When Bridget Jones’s Diary came out in the US in 1998, I felt seen. I, too, was a single young woman (28), living in a big city (New York), working as an assistant to a book editor (who also had floppy brown hair). Bridget made my hapless love life and career woes seem a lot more charming than they actually were. I read the book in a day. When the movie came out in 2001, I was still single. But so was Renée Zellweger, and she got her happy ending, so I thought: maybe?
Stephanie Merry: I didn’t read the book until a few years after its release, when I was studying abroad in Spain and someone had left a copy at the home of my host family. I was lonely in those first days after landing, and the book became an oasis, a bit of good cheer that eased the process of acclimation.
I think it’s easy to take for granted now what a revelation Bridget was then. The bumbling mess of a female protagonist is a mainstay of current commercial novels, but she felt fresh and surprising then – the way she so plainly grappled with her neuroses; her uncomfortable habit of getting in her own way. She arrived in the US just as Sex and the City was becoming a phenomenon, and I think that both filled a void by being very honest about how unglamorous (but still exciting) it could be to live and work and party in an urban environment. Also: both involved a lot of smoking.
Sophia Nguyen: To me, Bridget still feels very fresh, reading this book for the first time – with the Salman Rushdie blurb on the back cover and the chick-lit wars come and gone. We all talk very seriously about flawed female characters, angry female characters, complex and ambivalent female characters, etc, etc – but I’m not sure I’ve read one who is so unabashedly silly. I … loved it? I can’t get over how, in the middle of “cooking” her own birthday dinner, she decides to just get into the bath. Indelible!
Jacob Brogan: I was probably never the ideal reader of Bridget, but reading it recently for the first time, at 41, I was shocked by how much I loved it. There’s a deftness to Fielding’s prose style that works precisely because it emerges from Bridget’s chaotic personality and never tries to escape her manic worldview. Of smoking she writes: “Apparently there is a Martin Amis character who is so crazily addicted that he starts wanting a cigarette even when he’s smoking one. That’s me.” I love the effortless way Fielding has her admit to not really reading the book in question, and then the punchy pep of that second sentence. It’s that vitality that still makes it delightful to read today.
Hugh Grant, Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth starred in the film adaptation of Bridget Jones's Diary.
Nora: Revisiting the book now, I found it almost as enjoyable and relatable as I did all those years ago, even though my life no longer resembles hers (married, good job, kids). Many of her struggles – her self-doubt, her relationship with her parents – stretch beyond the life of a young singleton. Bridget remains endearing – though, and perhaps this is my age speaking, she seems too naive for such a clever girl. Daniel Cleaver – the last name is a warning! – should have been reported to HR the minute she received his opening message: “Jones: You appear to have forgotten your skirt.” Young colleagues, feel free to tell me to lighten up.
Stephanie: Rereading it, I still feel a sense of gratitude for the many laughs, especially the ones involving her friends. (It’s amazing how much less lonely a fictional friend group can make you feel.) They’re well-drawn and entertaining company: Tom, who objects to Bridget’s attempted teetotalling by saying that hanging out with her is like “going out for dinner with a whelk, scallop or other flaccid sea-creature”; Sharon, whose righteous anger almost always involves an unprintable term she coined for terrible men; and Jude, with her high-powered job and volatile love life. They’re all kind of a mess, but they know how to mobilise when one of them is in crisis (which is nearly always).
Nora: Sophia, I agree with your observation about Bridget being the most “unabashedly silly” female character to come along in a while. She’s much more Lucille Ball than Sarah Jessica Parker – the comedy is natural and goofy and effortlessly endearing. It’s smart slapstick.
But also, I question if we really think the chick-lit wars are over. In some ways, yes, the flurry of articles about it – and the term itself – may have disappeared, but I’d argue that the bias against “books for women” continues.
Sophia: Maybe! These days, it feels laughable to treat “books for women” as a niche – it’s basically the whole marketplace, at least for fiction. I’m sure there are still readers out there who recoil at books marketed with that label, but at this point they’re comparable to moviegoers who complain about superhero franchises – an outvoted minority.
Stephanie: There were a lot of dismissive reviews at the time (though, ahem, not in the Post, which praised Fielding’s “Austenian knack for picking out the telling comic detail”). But so much of Bridget’s concerns still feel relevant to me: the pressure to find a partner, to have kids, to weigh less, to eat better, and the obsessive ways we might internalise those societal expectations. I was on the lookout for ways that the novel felt dated, and of course there were a few. Though they mostly felt charmingly nostalgic to me, I imagine young readers might be completely baffled by talk of answering machines and landline trickery, especially dialling 1471 – the British equivalent of *69 – which allowed people to find out who called them last. Bridget spent a lot of time checking her phone, but it was still only a drop in the bucket compared to the hours we spend glued to ours.
Nora: Just a few years after Bridget came Andy, another hapless office worker who became enamoured – in a different way – with her boss, the unforgettable Miranda Priestly. Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) was its own kind of romance, an exploration of the complicated relationship between a challenging female executive and her assistant. It was feisty! Runway magazine made Pemberley Press, where Bridget toiled, seem positively cosy. Perhaps the legacy of Bridget is not so much witty romance novels but witty workplace novels that also function as industry exposes – with a dash of forbidden love. I’m thinking too of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’ The Nanny Diaries (2002), which took aim at another kind of employer: upper-class Manhattan parents. Relatable and funny, these books also delightfully skewered the book publishing, magazine and nanny industries.
But I think Bridget was less of a trailblazer with a legacy than just one (wonderful) addition to a long line of books riffing on Jane Austen. The names – Mark Darcy, Pemberley – are of course dead giveaways of the influence. Fielding has even jokingly admitted that she “pinched the plot” of Pride and Prejudice, her “favourite book of all time”. Even without this confession, it is easy to spot the parallels – Daniel Cleaver as Wickham, and so on. Fielding was far from the first or last to borrow from Austen. Will we ever tire of these adaptations? I doubt it.
Sophia: Even as we have tonnes of escapist fiction, romance fiction, even comic fiction about young women floundering in the city, I can’t think of anyone trying to channel Fielding – partly because it’s hard to imagine writing a female character in 2024 who is so thoroughly, daffily un-self-conscious. But it would be fun to see a Gen Z novelist take a shot at writing whatever their generation’s Bridget Jones might sound like.
