Miss Jones Meets Mr Darcy: Twentieth-Century Avatars of Jane Austen’s Protagonists in Bridget Jones’s Diary
Miss Jones Meets Mr Darcy: Twentieth-Century Avatars of Jane Austen’s Protagonists in Bridget Jones’s Diary

Summary/Abstract: Jane Austen’s work has inspired an impressive number of intertextual projects, few of which have generated as many controversies as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. The present paper will neither engage in the debates concerning Fielding’s allegiance to or betrayal of feminist ideals, nor discuss her novels’ questionable artistic merits, but will focus instead on the intricate layers of intertextuality at work in the creation of the two main protagonists. If as far as the two plots are concerned Fielding’s borrowings from Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion are relatively straightforward, the portraits of Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy are the result of quite complex fusions that go beyond Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to comprise various other characters belonging to a wider array of texts. The analysis of the female protagonist will refer in turn to all Austen’s novels and include parallels with her numerous heroines, while the discussion of Fielding’s Mark Darcy will entail an incursion across media, including the nineteenth-century original as well as its most famous film version in an attempt to reveal the numerous levels of dialogic interaction established between the various texts.

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