Bridget Jones's Diary

Bridget Jones is a thirty-something single woman living in London, and this is the year she has resolved to sort herself out. In a diary crammed with running tallies of her weight, cigarettes, alcohol units, and calories, she chronicles her wobbling attempts at self-improvement, her disastrous romantic decisions, and the well-meaning meddling of her friends and mother.

Torn between her charming, caddish boss Daniel Cleaver and the buttoned-up barrister Mark Darcy, Bridget stumbles through workplace humiliations, dinner-party interrogations from "Smug Marrieds," and the universal terror of ending up alone. Her voice—self-deprecating, sharp, and endlessly relatable—turned a fictional diary into a defining portrait of modern single life.

Loosely inspired by Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary launched a cultural phenomenon and helped define a genre. Warm, very funny, and quietly wise about the gap between who we mean to be and who we are, it remains the beloved first entry in the Bridget Jones series.