HELEN FIELDING'S 1998 Bridget Jones' Diary was an immediate international bestseller, charting a year in the life of a single British woman in her early thirties who struggles to balance feminism, the desire to have a boyfriend, smoking, drinking, eating (over the course of the year she loses seventy-two pounds and gains seventy-four), her family's absurdities, and her own insecurities, all as she plays a kind of Elizabeth Bennet, finally gaining her own Mr. Darcy (he's called Mark Darcy in Fielding's novel, but he's a Darcy nonetheless). Fielding's sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1...
