I love Bridget Jones. I love her to little pieces, just as she is. And I know, I know… that doesn’t make me special in any way whatsoever – if anything, it makes me the most basic of bitches. Lately, though, it feels as if my perpetual fondness for Renée Zellweger’s verbally incontinent spinster (and her poor little skirt) is fast shaping up to become the hill I eventually must die upon.

Why? Because a lot of people – and women, in particular – hate Bridget and everything she stands for. Every single time the first film hits an important milestone (we’re inching slowly towards its 30th anniversary), every time a new addition to the franchise drops, cultural commentators pop up from all over the internet to summarily dissect and analyse its perceived crimes with gusto.

To be fair to them, there is a fair bit wrong with it. In fact, I bet I can sum up everything that’s wrong with it – almost – by citing just one quote from the sacred text/2001 film: “Resolution 1.) Will obviously lose 20lbs. 2.) Always put last night’s panties in the laundry basket. 

“Equally important: will find nice, sensible boyfriend and stop forming romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, sexaholics, commitment-phobics, peeping Toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits or perverts. Will especially stop fantasising about a particular person who embodies all these things…”

Ah, Bridget. Those resolutions – scrawled merrily into her diary and narrated aloud by Zellweger as her character stomps purposefully through a snowy London landscape – tell us so much about our perennial everywoman. They also, as mentioned, underline the majority of people’s problems with her: she’s obsessed with her weight, for starters – an unhealthy yo-yo dieter who’s frequently fat-shamed by those around her and presented as ‘too big’, despite being a UK size 12. 

She’s terrified of dying “fat and alone” at the tender age of 32, and is bullied by basically everyone over her single status. She wanders through life hampered by a seemingly permanent fog of self-loathing. She’s forever falling for toxic men at worst (Daniel Cleaver hasn’t aged well in a post-MeToo world), and utterly lame ducks at best. And she’s got a nasty habit of pretending to be something she’s not, so long as it makes her more appealing to those aforementioned ducks.

Throw in the fact that she’s more than happy to lampoon her own career whenever a romance goes awry, and sure: Bridget Jones is no minister for women. And yet, as we prepare ourselves for the release of Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy – which sees our beloved Bridget navigating social media and dating apps while raising two young children as a single mum – I feel it’s important to, well… to redress the balance a bit. For the sake of fairness, y’know?

Here’s the thing: it’s incredibly easy to pick out Bridget’s faults. They’re low-hanging fruit and absolutely supposed to be ridiculous – she was, after all, dreamed up by Helen Fielding as a piece of chain-smoking contemporary literary satire. She’s also, though, unquestionably human: she’s flawed, she’s insecure and she’s as much a victim of the sexism and diet culture of the early 00s as anyone else.

That being said, Bridget is so much more than a woman who’s been programmed to hate herself by a patriarchal society. Because Bridget – whether you agree with her choices or not – is a romantic. She dreams big, she’s not afraid to tell men off when they treat her badly, and she yearns for more than just any old box-ticking boyfriend. Hell, when Hugh Grant’s Cleaver, still covered in broken glass after fighting the one and only Mark Darcy, basically begs her to take him back in the first film, she politely informs him that it’s “not a good enough offer for me” and leaves him out in the cold – a moment that’s almost as resoundingly wonderful a moment as when she savagely states that she’d “rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein’s arse” than work within 10 feet of her slimy ex.

Bridget, too, isn’t afraid of a career pivot. It might be Cleaver’s fault that she quits publishing, but it’s what drives her to strive for the impossible – secure herself that dream job in television. And, sure, the (happily fictional) Sit Up Britain might be to TV what Nuts and FHM were to magazines, but it’s a foot in the door for our girl. She works hard, she pays her dues, and, come the third film, she’s working somewhere near the top – if not at the top – as a genuine ‘calls the shots’ producer. 

Bridget might end up falling in and out of love with Colin Firth’s Mark for the first three films (spoiler alert: he’s dead in the new one, so their ever-shifting relationship status is no longer in doubt), but she remains utterly and steadfastly loyal to her beloved best friends, Tom, Shazza, and Jude – taking care to answer the latter’s tearful phone calls whenever and wherever required, even if it gets her in trouble at work. Enduring terrible dinner parties full to the brim with Smug Marrieds. Going out of her way to cook them (an admittedly terrible) dinner of blue soup and marmalade on her own birthday rather than insist they all pay for dinner and drinks in town.

Above all else, I love most of all that Bridget is – wait for it – strikingly ordinary. She can’t always think of the perfect thing to say, especially when she’s under pressure. She’s a lazy employee if she doesn’t feel inspired by her work. She gets jealous if her boyfriend spends all of his free time with his attractive colleague. She obsesses over her perceived imperfections. She’s plagued by imposter syndrome. She’s a sex-positive girly who knows she deserves pleasure as much as she does kindness and respect. She hangs out with her parents, swears like a sailor, saves her sexy knickers for best, has a handful of close friends, can sing a bit (albeit not well), can’t cook at all, and wears flannel pyjamas to bed when it’s cold outside.

Basically, Bridget walked so that the likes of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag could run. She’s the original Hot Mess with a penchant for breaking the fourth wall – albeit via diary entries rather than sneaky asides to camera. And she’s a staunch reminder, too, that the ordinary has the power to become extraordinary, if only we give it the chance. Now, Bridget is taking it upon herself to remind us that women in their 40s and 50s are every bit as deserving of love and visibility as the younger models so usually favoured by Hollywood. In the process, she shows us that you can have more than one great love affair – and that our stories continue long after that ‘happy ever after’ takes place.

All hail Bridget, then, for remaining every bit as divisive now as she ever once was. But who so many of us love… just as she is. 

Images: Allstar; Working Title; Getty