Bridget Jones Never Gets Old

How the beloved British diarist outlasted her critics

- Sophie Gilbert

Bridget Jones, as a character, has always hovered uncomfortably between the hard light of reality and the rosy glow of romance. When she first appeared, in newspaper columns written by the British journalist Helen Fielding during the mid-1990s, the 30-something Bridget was claimed as a totem of womanhood at the time: a calorie-counting, self-improvement-obsessed, chain-smoking, wine-guzzling singleton (a neologism Fielding immortalized); an earnest vassal of Cosmo culture and the embodiment of fearmongering Newsweek coverage about the plight of unmarried career girls. With Bridget, Fielding "articulated the traumas of a generation," the writer Alain de Botton observed.

But when Bridget's diary entries were published in book form, in 1996, her true narrative arc was revealed. It didn't chart a postmodern Gen X nightmare. It was lovingly cribbed from Pride and Prejudice. The most notorious single woman of an era, as her fans learned in the book and its 1999 sequel, and from the movies they inspired in 2001 and 2004, would be largely protected by the tired old trappings of the marriage plot: She would bag her Mr. Darcy and live happily ever after-with a few detours-in his dreamy detached house in Holland Park.

Her trajectory over the next decade-plus (in another round of newspaper columns; another book; and a third movie, Bridget Jones's Baby, in 2016, not based on a book) certainly had its requisite stumbles. But the character was steadied throughout by the Texan actor Renée Zellweger as the very English Bridget, an unpredictably brilliant piece of casting that just works.

How will the last cockeyed optimist in popular culture deal with the desolation of a husband's death?