We take a look back to remind ourselves of the ditzy character:
1. Bridget Jones is an only child, born on November 9. Her mother Pamela is an overly-doting woman who’s constantly trying to set her daughter up with rich men. Her father Colin is a laid-back man who can sympathise with Bridget over his wife’s erratic ways.
2. Bridget was born in 1962, making her 50 last week. However, she doesn’t appear to age like the rest of us – we saw her at just 32 in the film adaptation of Bridget Jones’ Diary in 2001 – and the new book is going to see her face life in her forties.
3. Known as Bridge to her friends, she hasn’t always lived in London. She studied English at Bangor University in North Wales – which, despite on-off boyfriend Daniel Cleaver finding laughable, currently sits in the top half of the The Complete University Guide’s national league table.
4. She started her infamous diary on New Year’s Day in an attempt to get her life sorted out; recording her weight, alcohol units drunk, cigarettes smoked, and like any good serial dieter, calories consumed. In these new installments of her life, Fielding has assured fans that despite Bridget’s best efforts, these bad habits still prevail.
5. Jones is obsessed with Colin Firth, and in particular his performance in the TV series Pride and Prejudice as Mr. Darcy. Firth, incidentally, went on to play Jones’s on-screen love interest in the film adaptations, the aptly-named Mark Darcy, although her love for the actor was cut out of the films to avoid confusion.
6. As well as Christmas jumper-wearing lawyer Darcy, Bridget’s love life also includes her charming but unreliable boss Daniel Cleaver. Over the years, these two men have fought for Bridget’s attentions, quite literally on a couple of occasions, but she hasn’t yet found her happy-ever-after with either.
7. Her parents live outside London, so her group of friends act as her surrogate family in the capital. They include raging feminist Shazza, self-help book addict Jude and Tom, ’80s one-hit wonder and “a total poof”.
8. With a degree in English, we first met Bridget while working at Pemberley Press. She switched to TV presenting after sleeping with her boss Daniel Cleaver, which, incidentally, is what got her the job at news programme Sit up Britain.
9. The last we heard of Bridget back in 2006’s Independent columns, she had just given birth to a baby boy. After much confusion over which of her leading men was the father, it turned out to be Daniel Cleaver.
10. The upcoming book will see Bridget face the new challenges the modern world poses, from analysing texts to obsessing over the number of followers she has on Twitter. “Nov 10 – Twitter followers: 0. Nov 11 – Twitter followers, still 0,” The Independent quipped.
