Photograph by Romy Curran.

Bridget Jones made her first appearance in February 1995, complaining amiably about her publishing job and obsessing over her rakish boss in a diary column in London’s Independent newspaper. “Last Tuesday, at the Cheapskate’s Wine Guide launch, weeks of flirtation appeared to climax. When the others were boring on about Stephen Fry […] Daniel moved behind me and murmured, “So … will I see you?” and then, more quietly, “I mean … see you?” – so horny.”

The writer of the column, Helen Fielding, had already published one novel, Cause Celeb, but it was Bridget—a worrier, a charmer, an expert at having a good time—who would make Fielding famous. The diaristic column, published anonymously at first, was a smash hit. Readers responded immediately to Fielding’s vivid portrait of single life in nineties London. Her novel Bridget Jones’s Diary—whose structure and characters were based loosely on those of Pride and Prejudice—was published less than a year after that first column, and Bridget became a kind of generational touchstone, a beloved figurehead and a lightning rod for critique. Fielding, who was thirty-seven, originally from West Yorkshire, and still working at the newspaper, meanwhile became almost as famous as a writer can get.

What is so striking, reading those very first columns thirty years on, is that it’s all there, right from the beginning: the levity and humor, even the influence of Austen. (Even before Fielding named her heroine’s love interest after Mr. Darcy, Bridget was moodily watching the BBC adaptation of Persuasion and concluding that she was Anne Elliot.) We can see Bridget’s combination of self-awareness and obliviousness, her cheerful resignation about the possibility of behaving like an idiot again sometime soon. Her voice is so instantly recognizable that one might forget that she didn’t always exist, that Fielding made her up, one day in the nineties.  

I caught up with Fielding about her writing life and the years since those early columns. She has gone on to write four more books—three more Bridget Jones novels and one standalone spy novel—and to work on the wildly popular film adaptations. Over Zoom, we talked about the role Austen has played in her work, her penchant for and methods of social observation, and what it’s like to have an alter ego. She is thoughtful and funny, with a finely tuned sense of the absurd.

INTERVIEWER

Did you always know that you were going to be a writer?

HELEN FIELDING

Words were the thing felt I had a facility with. I knew what to do with them, which I didn’t feel with a lot of other things—cooking, driving, anything practical, I wasn’t very good at. But I always wrote, starting when I was very small. I remember I put the word immobilized in an essay and a teacher at school wrote, “Whose word is this?”—implying that my parents had done my homework. I used to read a lot. Just anything. I liked words and all my family were all very funny, so we were always fooling around and making jokes. I grew up in the industrial north, it was quite sooty and dark. I’d read Jackie Collins and think, Oh, if I was a writer, I could have a swimming pool and be free and not have to go to work and I could go live somewhere hot.

INTERVIEWER

How do you write? Do you write every day?

FIELDING

I will if I’m in full-on mode. With a novel, there are some phases where you’re just thinking and gathering material and then it’ll get a momentum. I tend to do an old-fashioned working day, about ten till six. I don’t work in the evenings, and I don’t work on the weekends, so my mind knows, Okay, it’s time to do the writing now. When you get deep into a novel, into a flow state, it’s really nice and you don’t want to stop doing it. But before you get to that point, it’s harder. I always feel a bit unsettled if I’m not writing regularly—it’s like I haven’t got my handbag or something. Read More