Bridget Jones’s #MeToo makeover

Yet it seems that even Bridget Jones – the hapless singleton forever inclined to blame herself when her disastrous love affairs went wrong – has caught up with the #MeToo era.

Author Helen Fielding, 60, has resurrected her much-loved character and outed Bridget as a newly-minted feminist, railing against sexism in the workplace and expressing dismay that she felt unable to stand up to her lecherous male bosses more than 20 years ago.

Her disbelief features in a newly-released diary extract published over the weekend in which Fielding has her heroine reread her old diaries, recalling the leering and ogling she endured from her chauvinist bosses during her younger days.

“What did I put up with, in the days of these diaries, without even knowing I had the right not to put up with it?” she asks.

“Talk about #MeToo.” It was perhaps inevitable that Fielding would feel the need to give Bridget’s take on a post- #MeToo world, given that her famous creation – memorably brought to life on the cinema screen by Hollywood actress Renée Zellweger – has long had a habit of capturing the zeitgeist.

First appearing 23 years ago in a newspaper column written by Fielding and purporting to be the real-life diaries of a single thirty something in London, she became a lovably shambolic ambassador for single women throughout the Nineties and Noughties, lurching from one disastrous love affair – and employment – to another.

Her life – later transformed into three best-selling novels and hit films – unfolded amid a tightly-knit “urban family” of thirty something friends, but also a colourful cabal of employers and lovers, or employer turned lover in the case of lothario Daniel Cleaver.

Played with relish by Hugh Grant in the films, he had a taste for inappropriate communication over the offi ce email system, typing – among other to the point messages – “I like your t*ts in that top” and “You appear to have forgotten your skirt”.

Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones

Bridget Jones has caught up with the #MeToo era (Image: UNIVERSAL/ACTION PRESS)

JONES’S subsequent employer Mr Fitzherbert was little better.

Head of a publishing company and nicknamed ‘T*ts Pervert’ by Bridget, he requests she wears a tight dress to a book launch, while her TV producer boss Richard Finch, played on film by Neil Pearson, sends her on jobs less to showcase her talents than her breasts and bottom.

None of their tactics would pass muster two decades after they were first written, something Fielding hinted at earlier this year when she declared that “Bridget today would not have been treated the way she was.”

She had already started to remodel Bridget for a new era: in her last cinematic outing in 2013 she may still have been single but was pregnant and fighting off two men – long-term love Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth and new lover Jack Qwant played by Patrick Dempsey.

It marked a sea-change in that still-hapless Bridget was calling more of the shots.

Author/screenwriter Helen Fielding

Author Helen Fielding, 60, has resurrected her much-loved character (Image: GETTY)

Little wonder that two years on – and post the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal – the now fifty something Bridget, mother to Billy, 12 and Mabel, 10, takes a dim view of some of what went on in her past.

“I just accepted that part and parcel of having a job was that my boss would stare freely at my breasts, not know my name, and ask me to put a tight dress on to make an idiotic speech,” she writes.

“And Richard Finch who gave me my big break in TV still spent his entire time trying to get shots of my bum or my t*ts… None of that could happen now. Mr Fitzherbert and Richard Finch would lose their jobs, no question.”

HER words should be music to the ears of feminists who have long criticised Fielding’s creation for letting the side down with her obsessional desire to land a husband and self-flagellation. It’s a criticism Fielding has Bridget tackle head-on in her new diary extract, explaining that she felt unable to embrace feminism wholeheartedly in the past because of its exclusive, patronising tone.

“Solemn feminists like Camille Paglia and Germaine Greer seemed to be always telling us off, for being less feminist than them,” she writes.

Hugh Grant

Lothario Daniel Cleaver was played with relish by Hugh Grant (Image: GETTY)

“I felt like ‘a feminist’ was another intimidating thing you were supposed to be: along with thin, in a relationship, a mother, running your own business and gliding from person to person at parties.”

Her attitude has now changed: “Feminism is once again… a Thing. It’s a different thing. It’s not appropriated by solemn, self-righteous intellectuals. It’s every-woman’s now.”

Bridget is not entirely changed however, still subjecting herself to daily weigh-ins and worry over her alcohol intake – something increasingly obvious as her nightly diary becomes increasingly littered with tipsy errors.

And in a “mea culpa” – fuelled by chardonnay – she confides she may not always have been a victim of #MeToo but an occasional perpetrator. “The sexual attraction at work s [sic] not simple and looking back I’s [sic] did sexually harass Daniel Cleaver,” she goes on.

“But, thats [sic] different because I fancied him and, er, I was a woman and he was a man.”