Bridget Jones: is Helen Fielding's own loss the reason for Mark Darcy's death?

When Bridget Jones fans discovered the lead romantic character in the novels had been killed off in the latest book, reactions ranged from horror to fury.

Bridget still manages to find the “lightness in life”. Photo: Rex Features

By Rosa Silverman

The Telegraph - 03 Oct 2013

Many were at a loss to understand why the writer would have introduced such an unwelcome twist in the life of the fictional diarist.

But Bridget’s creator, Helen Fielding, has now shed some light on why Mark Darcy, the focus of the heroine’s affections through the first two best-selling novels, did not survive into the third.

The answer, it seems, could lie in the author’s own past, when her father was killed in a car accident.

Fielding was aged just 24 at the time and her loss made her realise that life does not always have happy endings, she revealed.

“It was horrible and shocking and it made me very aware that life is complicated and precarious,” she said.

“It’s like the keys of a piano, isn’t it? There are white notes and black notes. And there’s a tragicomic element in my writing; the happy ending is just where you choose to end a book. Life, with all its twists and turns, carries on beyond it.”
In this spirit, the new Bridget Jones novel, called Mad About the Boy, finds Bridget older and after “tough things have happened to her.”

Yet it is not all gloom and misery.
Despite the “blows”, Bridget still manages to find the “lightness in life”, her creator said.
Meanwhile the modern day reality is that things have changed for middle-aged women and their “sell-by dates” are being extended.
Bridget is now 51, but her shelf life is far from nearing its end.
More