Bridget is Back!

Hurrah! Bridget Jones is back! V. good news.

Time to bring out the Milk Tray and Bloody Marys. Singletons everywhere are rejoicing at the news that writer Helen Fielding is hard at work on a third installment of Bridget Jones’s Diary, set for release in November this year.

Thirteen years on since Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the new novel will see Bridget navigating a whole new phase in her life in present-day London.

The last time we saw Bridget, she was 30-something, obsessed with checking her voicemail, and counting calories, alcohol and cigarettes. Now, Fielding says, ‘it’s actually more like “number of Twitter followers: 0. Still no followers. Still no followers”.

‘I just found I had new stuff I wanted to say and things that were making me laugh,’ she told BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour. ‘Things that didn’t exist when I wrote the last Bridget. The way life is lived through texting and Twitter… how people can have entire relationships by text which in some ways are emotionally fulfilling.’

‘I’m having a lot of fun (writing it) and it’s making me laugh.’

Publishers are tight-lipped as to the rest of the novel’s plotline- but the biggest clue comes with the release of the third Bridget Jones movie later this year. The film, rumoured to be titled Bridget Jones’ Baby, was made entirely independently of the books, and is based on columns published in British newspaper The Independent between 2005 and 2006.

Fielding says the third book will follow on from the events of the film.

At the end of The Edge of Reason, Bridget is still happily living with love interest Mark Darcy. But in the third book, could bad ex-boyfriend Daniel Cleaver be back on the scene? Will neurotic Bridget discover online dating, or swap writing in her diary for blogging? Will she cope with giving up the Bloody Marys and becoming a parent? Fans are eager to find out.

It’s not hard to understand why the Bridget Jones series has become such a phenomenon. Bridget, with all her hopes and insecurities, is easy to relate to. Since starting out as a weekly column in The Independent in 1995, the Bridget Jones series has proven wildly successful. The columns became so popular that they were published as a novel in 1996, then followed by a sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, in 1999. Both became international bestsellers, and pay homage to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion.

The novels were also adapted into hit movies, starring Renee Zellweger as Bridget, and Colin Firth and Hugh Grant as Darcy and Cleaver.

I can’t wait to see what shenanigans Bridget gets herself into next. V. excited.

You can read the original Bridget Jones columns here.