Bridget Jones’s Diary (Helen Fielding, 1996)
A year of a thirty-something Londoner’s diary, with a man called Mark Darcy in it.
The marriage plot never went away; it moved to London flats and office parties. Tell it as a diary and make it funny.
You want something light and very funny that knows the novel without quoting it.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the shape of the romance, loosely, and a man called Mark Darcy.
Changes: everything on the surface: a single woman in 1990s London keeps a year-long diary of her attempts to improve her life, with mixed results.
A year of diary entries in 1990s London; often described as a loose adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, with a Mark Darcy in it.
Whose story is it?
Bridget’s, in her own diary.
How much time does it ask?
336 pages in paperback.
Penguin Books paperback, 1 June 1999, 336 pages.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More ways into Longbourn: Penguin Classics, ed. Vivien Jones (2002) · The Oxford World’s Classics edition (2020) · The Norton Critical Edition, fourth edition