(4 of 5)
By casting Bridget as a widow and single mother, Mad About the Boy emphasizes a quality frequently missed by critics of the first two novels, which is that their heroine, for all her apparent insecurities, is a tough nut. Diaries tend to function as dumps for self-loathing and despair, but even in the most humiliating of scenarios, Bridget almost always manages a clever comeback. As Elizabeth Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice, "My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me." Bridget tends not to notice the points she scores against her horrible bosses, dates and rivals, but her instinctive wit puts her in the Bennet tradition. D.A. Miller, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, who has taught Bridget Jones's Diary in courses on Austen, notes that the diary form itself pays homage to Austen, lifting Fielding's work above many pale imitations. Austen's heroines aren't writers, but Fielding's is. Bridget's storytelling, he says, is a "way of taking control of her situation."
Texts, Twitter and Tattoos
Fielding has spent the past dozen years writing, including a fourth novel, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (2003), which fell rather flat, plus work on the Bridget Jones screenplays and a Bridget musical (a long percolating project that she maintains will happen someday). All this, she says, has made her better at plot, so for Mad About the Boy she didn't borrow from Austen. Bridget does invoke the author, though, while trying to justify to her older friend Talitha (new to the franchise) her amorous plans with a younger man she's met through social media:
"We've been texting for weeks. Surely it's rather like in Jane Austen's day when they did letter writing for months and months and then just, like, immediately got married?"
"Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine-year-old off Twitter on the second date is not 'rather like in Jane Austen's day.'"
Texting and Twitter play an outsize role in the new novel, which finds Bridget solo-parenting two young children and seeking romance after a decade under Mark Darcy's chivalric guard. Readers can find biographical parallels here if they choose. Fielding is 55, with two children: Dash, 9, and Romy, 7. She separated from their father, American comedy writer Kevin Curran, a few years ago and moved back to London after nearly a decade in L.A.
But Fielding tries to keep the Bridget Jones phenomenon separate from what she calls the "normal little tram routes of life." Parenthood grounds her, with all its mystifying choices (mainly, in her telling, having to do with determining proper access to video games). So does her family, including her mother, sister and two brothers, all of whom, she says, share her sense of fun. Her brother Richard remembers the time Helen pointed out a review of one of her books. "It had equated her writing ability to that of a hamster," he says. For her next birthday, he sent a set of toy hamsters.