Helen Fielding's comic creation has come home: she returns to the
pages of 'The Independent' from Thursday. What will this most
famous singleton make of a world where Camilla has replaced Diana?
And, if she thought her thirties were bad, how will she cope with her
forties?

Published: 31 July 2005

It's true: Bridget Jones is back. And not as a film either, with 
pudding-faced Renée Zellweger miscast as Bridget, but in her
original, brilliant incarnation as a diary column in The Independent, 
starting this Thursday. It's a good 10 years since she
first appeared in print, reflecting on the single state and the world. 
Last time round, Bridget was struggling with the video
recorder and obsessing about Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus 
and the Hay and Scarsdale diets. Now she's
returning to the London bombings, DVD players, Camilla as Duchess of 
Cornwall and the GI eating plan. It's going to be
like Austin Powers being defrosted and returned to the modern world.

For Bridget was not only a synonym for a single woman in her thirties 
who wanted to get married but was equally anxious
to look like an independent woman who did not require validation by a 
boyfriend. She was the incarnation of the age, the
age in question being the mid-Nineties.

Since she last appeared in print, BJ's creator, Helen Fielding, has got 
married - to one of the scriptwriters for The
Simpsons - moved for a time to Los Angeles and had a baby. The two 
Bridget Jones films turned Bridget from a London
phenomenon into a global celebrity (in the process dispensing with the 
local colour and making her coterie of best friends,
Jude, Tom and Shazzer, look like a coven). And while Bridget herself 
remained locked in the Nineties, Helen Fielding
caught up with the zeitgeist by writing a book called Olivia Joules and 
the Overactive Imagination, about a go-getting
Bond-style heroine who tracks down Osama bin Laden. It was undeniably 
topical, but it lacked the charm of Bridget Jones,
not least her redeeming self-doubt.

It's going to be fascinating to see how Bridget handles the 
personalities and issues of contemporary Britain. What will she
make of human rights lawyers (and Mark Darcy was eligible precisely 
because he was one) now that the best known of
the breed is, er, Cherie Blair? How will she handle the frightful 
spectacle of the entire British establishment, plus Hello!
magazine, toadying up to Camilla? Bridget is not judgmental, but she 
was essentially a Diana girl.

She'll have been against the Iraq war - goes without saying - but what 
will she make of British Islamic fundamentalism, so
hostile both to her love life and her drinking habits? Bridget has the 
disconcerting capacity to home in on precisely the
issues that most of her sex and contemporaries are really interested 
in, rather than the ones they, and she, know they
ought to be interested in. Which is why, in her last job as a 
television researcher, Bridget produced a remarkable number
of the "And finally..." end-of-programme items on the Sit Up Britain 
programme she worked for.

So, while BJ will know that she should really be thinking about the IRA 
ending the armed struggle, she will probably be
thinking about how cool Nicole Kidman looks by comparison with Tom 
Cruise's fiancée, Katie Holmes, and how the root of
the problems between him and Nicole was obviously that she was about a 
foot taller than he. Most of Bridget's admirers
would have given anything to hear her thoughts on Kimberly Quinn during 
the business with David Blunkett.

It will also be interesting to see how the introduction to her daily 
diary looks these days. The first entry for Bridget Jones:
The Edge of Reason goes as follows: "9st 3 (total fat groove), 
boyfriends 1 (hurrah!), shags 3 (hurrah!), calories 2,100,
calories used up by shags 600, so total calories 1,500 (exemplary)".

It is, of course, a summary of all her chief preoccupations, except 
that for once she doesn't include an alcohol unit and
fags count. Bridget is by no means chaste, but she does like her sex to 
be in the context of committed relationships, where
possible. And at the end of the book, as at the beginning, she's having 
lots of sex with gorgeous Mark Darcy, who in the
first Bridget Jones adventures got her mother out of the hands of a 
dodgy Portuguese gigolo and, in the second, got
Bridget sprung from a Thai jail, where she'd ended up because of her 
friend Shazzer's unwise relationship with a drugsmuggler.

So although Bridget is totally career-minded, when she's not thinking 
about relationships, she is also curiously oldfashioned.
She gets into scrapes as a result of her warm, impulsive nature; Mark 
Darcy gets her out of trouble using cool
thinking and legal know-how. She knows about reality television and 
self-help books; he knows about politics and
economics. She went to Bangor; he went to Cambridge. So, while she's 
obviously a feminist (though not strident about it,
because there's nothing less attractive to men) and, one day, she'll 
get round to reading Susan Faludi's Backlash, her love
life is premised on a traditional division of attributes between the 
sexes.

Her politics, too, are feminine rather than feminist. Her parents may 
be the pure embodiment of Middle England, to the
extent that they are C of E, their friends have New Year's turkey curry 
buffets and her mother shops at Dickens & Jones
(now gone, alas), but Bridget would rather die than vote Tory - for 
emotional rather than rational reasons. If she did, she
says, she'd be "a social outcast. It would be like turning up at Café 
Rouge on a horse with a pack of beagles in tow or
having dinner parties on shiny tables with side plates". She is 
intolerant of Mark Darcy's Old Etonian baggage, but how will
she handle New Labour?

Not that it matters. Because the crucial feature of Bridget is that she 
is the embodiment of every woman's neuroses: about
her figure - though readers who weigh more than 10st find Bridget's 
angst when she's over nine particularly galling - about
her relationships, about her age. And particularly about being single 
and over thirty. As Shazzer puts it, "As women glide
from their twenties to thirties ... the balance of power subtly shifts. 
Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve,
wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying 
alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an
Alsatian." Nobody has put it better.

But will Helen Fielding still be able to identify with singletons (a 
term of her very own devising) now that she's married
herself? And, now that she's successful and filthy rich, will she be 
able to remember what it was like to miss the minimum
payments on her Access card? Bridget used to get uptight when her 
overdraft hit £200. To take account of contemporary
debt levels, she'll have to add a nought or two.

And if Bridget Jones was in her thirties 10 years ago, doesn't that, 
er, make her 40 or so now? If a single woman in her
thirties is tragic, what does that make a single woman in her forties? 
This week, to universal rejoicing, we'll find out.