Chasing Bridget

Bridget Jones, the character who so perfectly captured the mid-90s angst of mid-30s-and-counting single womanhood is no longer amusing ten years on when she’s still drinking Chardonnay and alternately sleeping with the same two men, argues Amanda Platell in today’s Daily Mail.
The author who captures the zeitgeist, as Helen Fielding did with Bridget Jones, catches the worm. But the Bridget Jones of the 90s, the icon we know, is still with us. She is still with us because the insecurities she represents have always been there.
‘I quake at the thought of it,’ says Miss Persephone Lincoln, one of the characters in Perfidy and Perfection, speaking of her upcoming Season in 1812. ‘Yet one must go through it if one is to acquire one’s town bronze, and of course a husband.’

Gareth Sibson is promoting his writing via the intriguing blog www.chasingbridget.com. What's the average man thinking when he finds himself dating the Bridgets or Carries of this world? asks the blurb to his romantic novel, Single White Failure, out this month. What is he thinking indeed? The premise of Sibson’s book seems to be that something’s gone wrong. Bridget Jones warmed the hearts of people who saw parts of their deepest fears articulated. ‘I would like to make a stand for marriage,’ writes India Knight in the Sunday Times (2/10/05) after a recent government population report which predicts increasing levels of singledom. ‘I think more people should do it and I also think tens of thousands of people are dying to do it but can’t express this ambition for fear of ridicule.’