Anglo Pop

How little, in some ways, has changed since the Bennet girls, hell-bent on marriage, dressed to kill for a visit from a herd of dashing soldiery. Like Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones's Diary addresses the radical instability of the single life as observed by a woman trapped between her instinctive feminism and the cultural pressures that play upon her insecurities at every turn. With all the hectoring from Smug Marrieds and her parents' friends, Bridget worries incessantly about being over the hill. Marriage would be nice, sex is a matter of some urgency - which leaves poor Bridget wide-open to the e-mailed blandishments of Daniel Cleaver, the office Lothario whose slick charm can be switched on and off at will, along with his constancy to Bridget. Daniel is every thinking feminist's nightmare - and wet dream. Bridget's attraction to him is a candid acknowledgment of the eternal female attraction to the leader of the pack. In all her excesses of booze, calorie counting and wrong-headed love, Bridget is a blessed release from the dull, compulsory sanity urged upon us by a thousand recipes for self-help. Her daily struggles are also a frank acknowledgment of the tricky point where feminist first principles butt heads with trying to find a mate in a romantic climate from which all rules and expectations have fled.

What sets Bridget apart from that woolly-headed gnat Ally McBeal is the fierce clarity of her voice and her refusal to buckle at the knees every time the world looks at her sideways. In the end, fortified like her good twin, Elizabeth Bennet, by a grade-A bullshit detector and a sharply jaundiced eye for the lunacy around her, Bridget can tell the difference between crap and a good proposition. When Darcy, a high-profile human-rights lawyer whom Bridget early on dismissed for his dweebery, at last puts in his bid, he pleads with Bridget, "All the other girls I know are so lacquered over." Like her creator, Bridget understands that Pride and Prejudice is the ultimate girls' own story because the heroine spends the entire novel growing a mind of her own, and gets the richest, handsomest, most eligible guy not by reducing her thigh circumference or brushing up on her cocktail prattle, but by being her candid, smart, adorable, ineluctably English self. God bless Bridget - and if they who are making a movie out of her fabulous diary so much as lift a finger to cast Calista Flockhart in the lead, I'll have their guts for garters.