Bridget Jones

Bridget Rose Jones is a fictional character created by British writer Helen Fielding. Jones first appeared in Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary column in The Independent in 1995, which did not carry any byline. Thus, it seemed to be an actual personal diary chronicling the life of Jones as a thirtysomething single woman in London as she tries to make sense of life, love, and relationships with the help of a surrogate "urban family" of friends in the 1990s. The column was, in fact, a lampoon of women's obsession with love, marriage and romance as well as women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan and wider social trends in Britain at the time. Fielding published the novelisation of the column in 1996, followed by a sequel in 1999 called The Edge of Reason.

Both novels were adapted for film in 2001 and 2004, starring Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones, and Hugh Grant and Colin Firth as the men in her life: Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy, respectively. After Fielding had ceased to work for The Daily Telegraph in late 1998, the feature began again in The Independent on 4 August 2005 and finished in June 2006. Helen Fielding released a third novel in 2013 (Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which is set 14 years after the events of the second novel) and a fourth in 2016 (Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries, where Bridget finds herself unexpectedly pregnant without being certain who the father is).

"Bridget Jones" is hailed as a British cultural icon and was named on the 2016 Woman's Hour Power List as one of seven women judged to have had the biggest impact on women's lives over the past 70 years.^[1]