Helen Fielding says Bridget Jones books are not anti-feminist

Mark Brown | The Guardian – May 26, 2017

Fielding says humour is a ‘very powerful tool’ and describes being able to laugh at yourself a mark of strength, not a weakness.

Helen Fielding’s four Bridget Jones books, helped by three films, have sold around 40m copies worldwide.

Bridget Jones novelist Helen Fielding has taken a swipe at “shallow” critics who call her books anti-feminist.

The writer was in Hay-on-Wye for the 30th edition of the literary festival and admitted the accusation was one that irritated.

“Number one, we are not a minority,” she said. “If we can’t laugh at ourselves, we haven’t got very far at being equal, have we? I think it’s worrying in the first place that people would think a book about a woman laughing about her foibles is not feminist. It is a mark of strength to be able to laugh at yourself, not weakness. Humour is a very powerful tool as we all know for getting through difficult times.”

Fielding’s four Bridget Jones books, helped by three films, have sold around 40m copies worldwide. But they have faced criticism that the Jones character is too much of a victim, too in thrall to men.

The Guardian writer Suzanne Moore has called it ‘anti-feminist’ fiction. “The humour that comes from her rhetoric about being a strong independent woman is always undermined by her pseudo neurosis – waiting for the man to ring or, now she has discovered social media, to ping.”

Fielding, who was born in Yorkshire and now lives in Los Angeles, told a hugely supportive audience at Hay: “If I may, the accusation of it being not feminist is a little shallow.”

The Jones books began as a column in the Independent in 1995, charting the chaotic life of a 30-something singleton in London.

Fielding, whose latest Jones book last month won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, admitted that she had regularly denied the character was based on her but could now admit it. “I was just embarrassed because I was trying to write serious novels ... I was very shy about the connection.” Although, she stressed, it was a hugely exaggerated version of herself: “I have never got pregnant by two men. I have never eaten more than 30,000 calories in one day.”

Among the serious novels Fielding had been writing was one about the cultural divide in the Caribbean. “It was so boring,” she said. She had also tried her hand at Mills & Boon, submitting a doctor-nurse novel called Fires of Zanzibar set in a refugee camp. It was turned down. “I really did put a lot of effort into it and they rejected it and sent me a letter saying ‘neither your characters nor your story are up to the standard demanded by Mills and Boon’. I was really upset and didn’t write anything for a few years.”

Fielding said she found the unpublished novel recently and read her last line about the doctor pulling the trembling, questioning nurse against him roughly and before delivering the line: “It’s all right, it isn’t a snake.”

“I think I can see why they rejected it,” she admitted to Hay.