Bridget Jones Books in Order
Thirty years after her debut in a column for The Independent, and twenty-four years after the first film adaptation, Bridget Jones is set to return next year in the fourth installment of the Bridget Jones film series.
Helen Fielding’s heroine started as a thirty-something single woman in London, on a quest to find her own Mr. Darcy while often embarrassing herself and drinking way too much. Obsessed with love and weight loss, Bridget Jones became a cultural icon of her time—both adored and critiqued.
While she first appeared in a weekly column, Bridget’s popularity skyrocketed when the column became a novel. And of course, when the novel was adapted into a film, with Renée Zellweger in the title role, alongside Hugh Grant and Colin Firth as the charming Daniel Cleaver and the reserved Mark Darcy, her place in pop culture was fully established.
Bridget Jones Series by Helen Fielding
The following descriptions are borrowed from publishers.
- Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996)
The plot is loosely inspired by Pride and Prejudice. Bridget Jones’s Diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud account of a year in the life of a thirty-something Singleton on a permanent doomed quest for self-improvement. Caught between the joys of Singleton fun, and the fear of dying alone and being found three weeks later half eaten by an Alsatian; tortured by Smug Married friends asking, “How’s your love life?” with lascivious, yet patronizing leers, Bridget resolves to: reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches, visit the gym three times a week not just to buy a sandwich, form a functional relationship with a responsible adult and learn to program the VCR.
For the second installment, Helen Fielding drew inspiration from Persuasion. Lurching from the cappuccino bars of Notting Hill to the blissed-out shores of Thailand, everyone’s favorite Singleton Bridget Jones begins her search for The Truth in spite of pathetically unevolved men, insane dating theories, and Smug Married advice. She experiences a zeitgeist-esque Spiritual Epiphany somewhere between the pages of How to Find the Love You Want Without Seeking It (can self-help books really help self?), protective custody, and a lightly chilled Chardonnay.
While released last, Bridget Jone’s Baby is set prior the events of Mad About the Boy. Before motherhood, before marriage, BRIDGET JONES, with biological clock ticking very, very loudly, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at the eleventh hour. Her joyful pregnancy is dominated, however, by a crucial but terribly awkward question – who is the father? Mark Darcy: honourable, decent, notable human rights lawyer? Or Daniel Cleaver: charming, witty, notable fuckwit?
Fourteen years after landing Mark Darcy, Bridget’s life has taken her places she never expected. But despite the new challenges of single parenting, online dating, wildly morphing dress sizes, and bafflingly complex remote controls, she is the same irrepressible and endearing soul we all remember—though her talent for embarrassing herself in hilarious ways has become dangerously amplified now that she has 752 Twitter followers. As Bridget navigates head lice epidemics, school-picnic humiliations, and cross-generational sex, she learns that life isn’t over when you start needing reading glasses—and why one should never, ever text while drunk.