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Helen Fielding

Helen Fielding is an author.

Helen Fielding is a British journalist, novelist and screenwriter who invented Bridget Jones in an anonymous newspaper column for the Independent and accidentally defined a decade of comic writing. Her first novel was set in an East African refugee camp and drew on her work in television documentary; the column that followed was meant to be filler. Four Bridget novels and four films later, the diary form she borrowed and sharpened has been imitated so widely that it is easy to forget how precise the original is about loneliness, work and the gap between the two.

Books (16)

Where to start with Helen Fielding

Bridget Jones's Diary is the one, and it is far crueller and funnier than the films it produced. Bridget Jones carries the sequel. Bridget Jones. Mad About the Boy is the late one that turns unexpectedly sad and is the better novel for it. Cause Celeb is the pre-Bridget book about aid work, and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination is the outlier.

The Bridget Jones novels in order

The diary and its sequels, which are sharper and considerably crueller on the page than on screen. Mad About the Boy is the one nobody expects: the comedy is intact and the grief underneath it is real, and the collections gather the run for anyone starting from scratch.

Genres Helen Fielding works in