Bridget Jones’s Diary

Helen Fielding

Oh, not that old thing, I hear you say! It was published donkey’s years ago! Besides, I’ve seen the movie a million times.

All true. But, did you know the Romantic Novelists’ Association, last December, named it the most popular romantic book of the last sixty years? And I’m so pleased. It was always my guilty pleasure to rate this as one of my all-time favourites when the snob in me insisted I should be listing works deemed far more worthy.

Reviews of this book appear to fall into two main categories. Those who adore Bridget because they see themselves in her. And those who find her frustrating, exasperating and a poor role model for women, with her obsessions about weight and boyfriends. I am in the first camp, obviously, and would go further. I am Bridget Jones! Annoyingly, I’m part of a rather large group of women who all declare the same.

My credentials for the role of doppleganger are as follows: I weighed myself every day, smoked too much, drank too much. I’m not sure I ever fell out of a taxi – though that’s the movie version – but I could have done, many times over. I had a Daniel Cleaver boyfriend and was rescued by a Mark Darcy. If any of you have read my stories of culinary misadventure (The Fish Pie Incident, The Pumpkin Soup Incident) you will know that blue soup and marmalade for dessert are both dishes I could have plausibly made. I didn’t write nasty things in a diary, subsequently read by my Mark, but I did find it hard to date someone with terrible taste in clothes and shoes, despite being a thoroughly good human being. Yes, I was that shallow.

Yet, the irony for me and many other woman of a certain age, who rode on the coattails of the feminist revolution of the seventies, was that we thought we were liberated and had put Bridget’s self-inflicted scrutiny about weight, attractiveness, and relationship status, behind us. Bridget demonstrated that, for all our raised consciousness regarding gender and equality, we were still (are still?) burdened by guilt when we fail to meet the high standards we set for ourselves.

The lovers of Bridget’s diary clearly won the day. She gave us permission to be kind to ourselves: we were not alone with our neuroses. There was a searing honesty to her experiences which made us feel seen and heard. It led us to believe the character was real. She was me, she was you. And, as for role model, Bridget may have chosen goals which we question and squirm over today, but she is relentlessly positive, a terrific and loyal friend, with a goodness that shines through despite her flaws.