Keeping up with Ms Jones

Ten years on, a new Bridget book has the heroine in her 50s, a mother of two and a widow. Oh dear. By Glenda Cooper

HOLDING court at the charity gala, there was a 50-something blonde looking terrific, accompanied by a younger, deeply attractive man.

It was a scene that could have provided the opening of the latest instalment of Bridget Jones's Diary, in which the perennial singleton hits her fifties and takes up with a toyboy - but, in fact, it was Jones's creator, Helen Fielding.

"I'm not sure if he was actually her boyfriend, but she looked bloody fabulous and was great fun," said a fan, who met her that night two years ago. "He said he was in waste disposal. I don't know if that meant he was an assassin or a bin man."

After nearly a decade away, Fielding has found herself back in the spotlight, with her third Bridget novel, Mad About the Boy, out this week. In what Jon Howells of Waterstones called a "spot-on" bombshell announcement, Fielding's appalled followers have learnt that Bridget is back, but with three crucial differences - she's 50-something, she has two children, and she's a widow; the hero of her first two books, Mark Darcy, has died.

Of course, much remains the same: Bridget's ability to cause chaos; her addiction to self-help books (French Children Don't Throw Food replacing Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus); drinking too much; nicotine addiction (even if it's now gum rather than cigarettes); and dealing with bad-boy Daniel Cleaver's sexual demands.

But has Fielding's own life today affected her fictional creation? She has always maintained that her hapless singleton is not autobiographical. She had originally been asked by a newspaper executive to write a first-person column about the life of a 30-something single woman, but finding it too embarrassing, chose to create a fictional persona instead.

It was a hit. For women, shock recognition accompanied every week's instalment as Bridget laid bare the '90s scene - writing about singletons, Smug Marrieds and "emotional f***-wittage".

A friend and I once met Fielding at a party in the early days of the diary, and several glasses of chardonnay later, gushingly revealed how much we loved Bridget and how she must have been eavesdropping on our conversations to write the jokes she did. She was charming and warm - and then patiently endured lots of other women telling her the same.

Even if it's not totally autobiographical, Fielding undoubtedly drew on her own experiences to create Bridget - as she had done with her previous novel Cause Celeb, which satirised her experiences of celebrity aid work and Comic Relief. And, intriguingly, it seems the lives of Fielding and Jones still collide.

Both have two children - Fielding, 55, has a nine-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter - while Bridget has the slightly younger Billy and Mabel.

Unlike Bridget, Fielding never married - her engagement to Kevin Curran, a TV executive on The Simpsons, and the father of her children, broke up in 2009. She returned to the UK where she found herself a singleton again, not unlike Bridget's new status as a widow.

Both have strong groups of friends. Jude and Tom have already made an appearance in the new Bridget extracts published so far, although, intriguingly as yet, no Shazzer (based on Fielding's great friend Sharon Maguire, who directed the first Bridget Jones movie).

Fielding, meanwhile, counts as good friends actors Carrie Fisher and Tracey Ullman in LA; in the UK she is close to broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and writer and director Richard Curtis, a former boyfriend who collaborated on the Bridget films. He has revealed that Fielding gave an advance copy of Mad About the Boy to his teenage daughter Scarlett to read before him.

Bridget lives somewhere in London with a nanny for her children, just like Fielding, who lives in a Georgian townhouse doing the school run in leather trousers. One extract from the new diary has Bridget flicking V signs at people on the school run. Fielding wrote a piece earlier this year about the horrors of taking her kids to school "and . yelling, "Oh go f *** yourself!" at an SUV, then realising it was being driven by the deputy headmistress.

In the same piece, her companions on a holiday to Oman revealed that as the "Now boarding" sign flashed up, Fielding was merrily texting "Yayy! We're all packed and on our way. Is it Gatwick Sth or Nth?" "It's Heathrow Terminal 3, Helen," they replied.

Yet after more than a decade since the last Bridget Jones novel and seven years since the columns made a brief return in The Independent (when Bridget had a baby son by Daniel Cleaver), fans are asking if Bridget herself has lost her way?

Fielding certainly agonised about whether to revive the character, whose diaries became one of the defining books of the 20th century. "I got all self-conscious. I didn't want to just churn out another one. I really care about Bridget, about her as a character and about her integrity," she said earlier this year.

Fielding's success in the '90s meant that Bridget Jones came to define the Chick Lit phenomenon, but as a result many missed the satire that pervaded her books.

Now Bridget returns to a crowded marketplace in women's fiction; her gags about Twitter mishaps, perfect school mothers and playdates are already out there. Her readers are familiar with the ups and downs of working mums, for example in Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, while Gill Hornby has detailed the horrors of playground politics in The Hive. Other titles such as The Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife and The Rise and Fall of the Yummy Mummy have also encroached on her territory.

Bridget also finds herself having to compete in a less innocent world; as one blogger has put it , we were all "drunker, thinner, richer" when Bridget started in 1995 - a pre-9/11 age where the housing market was starting to boom and (try explaining this to the twerking generation) a man getting out of a lake in a wet shirt could be seen as the erotic moment of the decade.

So clearly something dramatic was called for, although few expected the death of Darcy.

Making Bridget a widow isn't the end of a franchise, although authors mess with beloved characters at their peril as Conan Doyle found with Sherlock Holmes, and Dickens with Little Nell.

John Sutherland, professor of literature at University College London, suggested that widowhood is an underexplored area in literature (could Fielding, who has taken Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion as past models, be moving on to Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch for comic treatment?) and with an ageing demographic, Fielding may have hit on an emerging trend ahead of her time as she did with the "urban family", in which a close circle of friends replaces relations, in the '90s.

But for many readers of these initial extracts, the problem is that Bridget doesn't seem to have grown up very much, despite the seismic changes - motherhood, widowhood - that her creator has bestowed on her; a 30-something singleton trapped in a 50-something body.

Has Fielding confused Darcy's declaration that he loved her "just the way you are" with "stay the way you are". Would a 51-year-old single parent really be obsessed with thigh-high boots and Twitter?

Fielding's an accomplished satirist and I hope the full novel will be a return to form - she can, after all, capture the older woman.

I still giggle at Bridget's mother abandoning sieving the gravy in a midlife crisis with the words: "I'm going out, darling. I'm going out to get laid."

Because, after all, we need a laugh. The truth about Bridget's re-emergence as a 50-something is that it reminds us we've all got 20 years older since we first met. And that's enough to put us all back on the chardonnay and fags. - © The Daily Telegraph, London

• Mad About The Boy by Helen Fielding (R250) is published by Random House and will be in SA bookshops this week.