Gaaah! Bridget Jones has been dumped again — and this time by her own creator, Helen Fielding. The author brought the hopeless singleton out of retirement last year with Mad About the Boy, the third in the series, but Fielding says she is putting Ms Jones, played in the film version by Renée Zellweger, back on the shelf, preferring to do the cleaning.
“I’m trying to stop writing at the moment,” Helen told me at the launch of Allie Esiri’s The Love Book. “I’ll only write one if it feels natural, if there’s something I really want to say and there’s a story I want to tell. We’ll see if that moment happens.”
What has prompted Fielding to leave Bridget, a new widow in the last book? Sales were swinging — the hardback edition shifted almost 300,000 copies, making it the second-biggest-selling novel of the year. Perhaps critics stung her. The book was described as “a clunking disappointment” by the Telegraph, the Sunday Times derided its “hysterical tone”, and the Observer decided Fielding was “hampered by her own legacy”.
But if Bridget is being left to die alone eaten by alsatians, as was her fear, how is the author filling her time? “I’m doing all the things you get to do when you’re not writing books,” Fielding told me. “Like tidying up. I sat down and wrote a few days ago and immediately stopped myself and cleaned out the attic. That’s my new purpose.”
Domesticity may be a dull choice for a woman who came to define the chick-lit genre but if Fielding’s words to Vogue last year are anything to go by, she will find contentment. “The happy ending is just where you choose to end a book,” she mused. “Life, with all its twists and turns, carries on beyond it.”
