Before there was Anastasia and Christian Grey—or Bella and Edward—there was Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy (and Daniel Cleaver). Today, publisher Alfred Knopf announced that author Helen Fielding's third installment in the days and nights of the quintessential British singleton: "The story will be set in present-day London, with Bridget at a later stage in her life." Fielding said, "My life has moved on and Bridget’s will move on, too... I hope people will have as much fun reading it, as I am writing it.”
The original Bridget Jones's Diary was published in 1996 and the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (which featured that 1990s plot convention—Southeast Asian trip with drug smuggling), was released in 1999, featuring a single 30-something woman bumbling with her love life and monitoring her weight and alcohol intake. The books became even more popular when Renee Zellweger put on weight and a British accent in the 2001 and 2004 films. Knopf Chairman Sonny Mehta said, "Few writers can rival Helen Fielding when it comes to fully capturing the modern woman. Her writing is both funny and heartfelt, and her observations about life are piercing and mordantly rendered. I have been waiting a long time to see what’s next for Bridget Jones, and I am beyond thrilled that she’s back."
The first Bridget Jones book was loosely based on Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, with Bridget as a, some might say, "demented" Elizabeth Bennet, while The Edge of Reason was inspired partly by Austen's Persuasion. Fielding will be attending BookExpo America in New York on June 1—she'll probably have more details to spill then. Perhaps it'll involve some Emma, spinning and Botox. But where's the Bridget Jones stage musical?
