Summary
Narrated in the first person and written as a diary by the novel’s protagonist, Bridget Jones, Bridget Jones’s Diary opens with Bridget declaring her intentions for the new year. She will drink less, stop smoking, stop wasting money on useless things, stop spending more than she earns, stop falling in love with alcoholics, workaholics, misogynists, and perverts, stop being unkind to people behind their backs, and stop obsessing over Daniel Cleaver, her boss at her publishing-company job. She vows to develop the inner poise necessary to get a boyfriend and form a “functional relationship,” reduce her thigh fat with an anti-cellulite diet, get rid of junk and clothes around her flat, find a better job, save money, be more confident and assertive, exercise, and learn to program her video recorder.
Declaring January a very bad start to her New Year’s resolutions, Bridget lists her current weight at 9st 4 (130 pounds), and the excessive alcohol, cigarettes, and food she has consumed in the last day. She wakes at noon on the first and laments that she has to drive to her parents’ best friends the Alconburys’ Turkey Curry Buffet. Her mother manipulated her into promising to attend as far back as August, hinting that she could be set up with a family friend from childhood named Mark Darcy, who is a rich, divorced barrister (lawyer).
Later that night, Bridget writes about how she cannot believe she is starting the year again in a single bed in her parents’ house. She recounts how she arrives at the buffet in Northamptonshire late, and still hungover. Una and Geoffrey Alconbury comment on how she drove the wrong route and immediately ask whether she has found a man to date, which they don’t understand is an impolite question. Soon she is whisked toward Mark, who she notes is tall but wears white socks with a bumblebee pattern.
They make awkward conversation about books, as Bridget works in publishing but doesn’t read much outside her job. When Una suggests Mark take her phone number to get in touch while in London, Mark says Bridget’s life is probably quite full already. That night, Bridget laments his obvious lack of interest in her, although she didn’t necessarily want his number anyway. On Jan 3, Bridget returns to work with reluctance and concerns about having gained a pound, and then another, both of which she loses by the 5th. She goes out one night with friends to discuss the “emotional fuckwittage” of a man her friend has been seeing but who won’t commit to her.
Bridget’s boss, Daniel, starts messaging flirtatiously over the work computer system about her skirt being too short. Bridget self-doubtingly but excitedly plays along until he asks for her phone number. He puts off making a date, however, making Bridget feel self-pity. He cancels on her once, and Bridget vows to stop being interested, but on the following Friday, at the end of the month, they finally go out. Daniel kisses her at the end of the date and brings her to his flat, where they tear at each other’s clothes.
As he undoes the zip on Bridget’s skirt, Daniel says, “This is just a bit of fun, OK? I don't think we should start getting involved.” Bridget stops him undressing her and says, “How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.” Her glee at telling him off is soon replaced by worry as she imagines she will end up dying alone and be found having been half-eaten by an Alsatian (German shepherd).
In February, Bridget visits her parents for Sunday lunch. Her mother snaps at her father during the meal, which she normally never does. She is also tan from a vacation and seems more confident than usual. Bridget goes to a dinner party with several couples who interrogate her about still being single, irritating Bridget very much. She calls her father, who says without elaborating that he and her mother are having “problems” and that he can’t talk right now. Daniel and Bridget flirt again over office-system messages, but Bridget insists, in her diary, that she won’t sleep with him. She calls her parents several times over the first week and a half of February but they won’t answer.
Eventually her father leaves a message saying he’s coming to London to meet her for lunch. Her mother leaves practically the same message. Bridget frets over having them both independently coming to see her at the same time. Her mother then calls to say Bridget’s father can go see her, having his “bloody way” as usual and that she is going out to “get laid.” Bridget is unused to her mother swearing. Her dad turns up sobbing, saying she has been this way since she went to Albufeira with two female friends. He says she has been complaining about having to do unpaid housework and that she wants him to move out for a while. He says Bridget’s mother told him he thinks the clitoris is a variety of butterfly or moth.
On Valentine’s Day, Bridget is displeased to receive no cards, flowers, or chocolates. The day after, she notices a card addressed to The Dusky Beauty in the entrance hall of her building. She checks obsessively for days and the dark-haired woman in the flat downstairs, Vanessa, doesn’t take it. Eventually they open it together. Bridget lets out a high-pitched noise when she reads: “A piece of ridiculous and meaningless commercial exploitation—for my darling little frigid cow.” Bridget’s friends suggest she have nothing to do with Daniel; Bridget decides to remain aloof.
After meeting for lunch, Bridget spots her mother shopping with a man named Julian, who Bridget’s mother claims she isn’t having an affair with. Bridget doesn’t believe her. Bridget’s father moves into the Alconburys’ granny flat in their backyard and keeps Bridget up with phone calls “just to talk.” Toward the end of the month Bridget and Daniel kiss in the elevator and make a weekend date. Bridget is in a bliss-like state of “shag-drunkenness” afterward, but soon worries over the uncertainty of not knowing if they are now going out. She resents her mother for the ease with which she can move from one relationship to another, torturing herself with the thought of her mother having sex without anxiety.
Analysis
The opening pages of Bridget Jones’s Diary see Helen Fielding establishing the humorous, self-deprecating voice of the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Bridget Jones. At an undisclosed point in her thirties, Bridget is a young professional who works in publishing in mid-1990s London. The New Year’s resolutions she sets out symbolize the dissatisfaction she feels with her life as it is; she seeks to correct her vices, attitude, appearance, and disastrous dating record. The novel will depict Bridget struggling between these self-improvement goals and her natural tendency to veer toward things that are bad for her.
The opening pages are also significant because they establish the novel’s premise: written as Bridget’s supposed private diary, the format of the novel invites a voyeuristic intimacy between the reader and the narrator. Believing she is having a conversation only with herself, Bridget is her truest, most-unvarnished self, which encourages trust and sympathy as the reader sees, perhaps better than Bridget can, the patterns that govern her life.
Bridget’s year begins with a satirical scene that takes shots both at the pressures of being single and at middle-class social conventions—two of the book’s major themes. With great reluctance, Bridget drives out of the city to attend her parents’ friends’ “Turkey Curry Buffet,” an annual event in which middle-aged, middle-class people a generation older than Bridget gather to get tipsy and ask inappropriate, probing questions of single people like Bridget. Una Alconbury uses the event as an opportunity to try to marry Bridget off to Mark, a divorced lawyer Bridget used to play with when they were kids. In this stilted environment, Bridget dismisses Mark Darcy as a bore—a Geoffrey Alconbury in the making. Little does she know how significantly her opinion of Mark will change before the end of the year.
Fielding introduces the theme of male immaturity with Bridget’s first outing in the new year with her other single friends. Together, they get drunk and denounce the men they have to date. Sharon posits that the power balance of the sexes has shifted now that they’re in their thirties: As women face pressure to settle down and have a child before their biological clock runs out, men become increasingly irresponsible, knowing they can jump from relationship to relationship, able to waste women’s time now that they, as men, consider themselves the more-desirable commodity. Bridget hopes Daniel, her boss, will be different, but he proves himself just as emotionally immature when he leads Bridget on and only mentions his desire not to “get involved” as he is undressing her.
Marital strife, another of the book’s major themes, also arises in the opening chapters. Breaking with decades of predictable behavior, Bridget’s mother decides she has had enough of being a dutiful housewife and begins an affair with a Portuguese man she met while on holiday. The month of February ends with Bridget reflecting on the irony that her mother, who is in her sixties, has the emotional armor to jump from one relationship to another and have sex without getting her hopes and fantasies of love wrapped up in it. In Bridget’s case, she is sick of being single and wants a level of commitment Daniel isn’t capable of offering.
