Bridget Jones and the Cultural Capital of International Justice: Narrating Human Rights, Conflict, and Internationalism in “Chick Lit”

I explore narratives of human rights, conflict, and “the international” in Bridget Jones’s Diary and argue that this text communicates the importance of “the international” through representations of the corresponding cultural capital attached to a specifically “international” idea of human rights, conflict, and justice. Written by Helen Fielding and published in 1996, Bridget Jones’s Diary is a foundational work of the Anglo-American “chick lit” publishing scene. The genre of “chick lit” is used to describe fiction that engages with the lives of young women, usually in urban environments, and targets women consumers. Often used disparagingly in popular culture as a shorthand to denote the perceived literary and political triviality of the work, “chick lit” sits within the broader romance genre – a genre that constitutes a growing billion-dollar market. Drawing heavily from Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice, Fielding’s book was an international bestseller, selling over 15 million copies worldwide as of 2016 and leading to three sequels and four corresponding film adaptations. Despite facing criticism for its casual treatment of sexual harassment in the workplace and Bridget’s fixation on calorie-counting, the legacy and cultural significance of Bridget Jones appears secure: in 2024, the fourth film set a record in the United Kingdom (the UK) and Ireland for the highest-grossing opening weekend of any romantic comedy, while in 2020 a poll run by the UK-based Romantic Novelists’ Association voted Bridget Jones’s Diary the most popular romantic novel of the last 60 years. In this paper, I treat Bridget Jones’s Diary as an important literary and cultural artefact and examine the representation of human rights, conflict, legal justice, and “the international” within the novel, its sequels, and the film adaptations. I look specifically at Bridget’s career shift from the publishing industry to a job as a television reporter on current affairs, the framing of Mark Darcy’s desirability as a love interest for Bridget being grounded in his successful career as a human rights lawyer, characters’ discussions of conflicts current to the time, and the unique intertextuality of Bridget Jones’s Diary with Austen’s novels and their adaptations. I argue that Bridget Jones’s Diary, and “chick lit” more broadly, offer distinct imaginings of our world that are important to engage with given their enduring and widespread popular appeal.