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Books

Helen Fielding has lost her touch

Bridget Jones in Mad About the Boy is unrecognisable — and why is she weighing herself in pounds, not stones?

19 October 2013

9:00 AM

19 October 2013

9:00 AM

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy Helen Fielding

Cape, pp.400, £18.99, ISBN: 9780385350860

To understand quite how disgruntled the reviews of the latest Bridget Jones diaries have been, you have to recall quite what she meant to her readers first time round. It wasn’t just the way she seemed to sum up the female condition for unmarried women in their thirties — indeed, she put a name on it, the singleton — who were torn between theoretical commitment to feminism and a creeping dread of never settling down and dying alone and getting eaten by Alsatians.

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