Helen Fielding

Helen Fielding (born 19 February 1958) is a British novelist, screenwriter and journalist, known for her creation of the fictional character Bridget Jones depicted in eponymous novels and films.

Helen Fielding

Quotes

• I think that if you're not a fan of irony as a form of expression, then a book that contains the line, "There's nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism" is going to make you cross. I also think that if we can't have a comic female character, if we can't laugh at ourselves without having a panic attack about what it says about women, we haven't got very far with our equality.
  • Interviewed by Viv Groskop, as cited in "Bridget Jones: older, yes, but still mad about the boys", The Observer (2 June 2013)

• I never imagined it would last more than a few weeks. I didn’t tell any of my colleagues it was me who was writing Bridget. I was working alongside a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya and I felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning, Then we started getting letters praising the column, I started boasting, "It's by me, meeeee!" and things snowballed from there.
  • "I was working for The Independent when I started writing Bridget Jones", The Independent (26 March 2016)
  • Fielding's Bridget Jones column ran in The Independent from 1995 to 1997.

• The jokes in Bridget come from something quite painful, which was her perception that she was in her thirties and she'd somehow made a mistake by not getting married yet and there's this ticking clock. But also there were good reasons why she was still single.
  • Interviewed by Hadley Freeman, as cited in "Helen Fielding: 'I'm very protective of Bridget Jones'", The Sunday Times (18 August 2024)