When Helen Fielding began to write the column, she thought it might last for six weeks. By 2007, Guardian readers in an online poll placed Bridget Jones’s Diary alongside The Catcher in the Rye and Nineteen Eighty-Four among the ten novels which best defined the twentieth century. Academics today wrangle over what it might or might not tell us about the present state of feminism or post-feminism. Book-length critical works are published on it. Fan fiction based on the characters proliferates online. Bridget Jones has come a very long way since 1995.
