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“... Ray), got dumped by her boss and eventually mended her broken heart. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding’s novelisation of her very successful Independent column, Bridget, a funny, smart, insecure publishing junior, guides us, entry by entry, through the year in which she falls in love with her boss (a specious creep called Daniel), gets dumped ...”

“... It a working-mother version of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Pearson is a more literary writer than Helen Fielding (and almost as funny). On the other hand, both novels, while seemingly on the side of their plucky post-feminist heroines, revel in their pratfalls and humiliations. And both send conservative, ultimately dispiriting messages about women’s ...”

“... match, Cate Blanchett is rumoured to be portraying Mata Hari in a Robert Altman TV film, and Helen Fielding has created Olivia Joules, in her Bond-parody follow-up to Bridget Jones, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination.† There’s nothing of the Amazon about Olivia: she’s a curvy blonde, wears Prada and uses her face powder to dust the ...”

“... often a sign that a person may be ‘crossing the threshold’ to the ‘altered realm’). As Helen Fielding did with Bridget Jones, Meyer has hitched a ride on the Mr Darcy plotline, but without bothering to give her heroine any of Elizabeth Bennet’s spirit – raising a reprise of the Bridget question, why would a man of any style or substance ...”

“... a larger entry in the Index than ‘Dickens: novelist’. A gem is Jane’s account to her cousin, Helen, of the great ball they went to at Bath House in July 1850, at the height of the London season. ‘Mr C.,’ Jane reports, ‘was “quite determined for once in his life to see an aristocratic ball”.’ Seeing was one thing, being seen another. What ...”

“... Van and The Clothes They Stood Up In as their this month’s read. It’s actually the choice of Helen Fielding, whom I’d imagined utterly metropolitan but turns out to come from Morley, though now living in Los Angeles presumably on the proceeds of her two bestsellers. After the segment we have tea in the Pierre and talk about Leeds, and I walk down ...”

“... which is perceived or marketed as appealing to young women’ – it is not the fault of Helen Fielding’s comedy of manners. Fielding’s blundering, know-nothing heroine, ‘rudderless and boyfriendless’ at 32, has been imitated in any number of opportunistic rip-offs, in which the incidental comic ...”

“... Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed scrutiny. It may be worth asking how Lever (born 1806) contrived to predate Jane Austen. If Spender wants ...”

“... the perceived benefit is to get well or to get high. After the Trojan War, according to Homer, Helen gave Telemachus a draught of nepenthe – almost certainly a reference to a Theban opium – to ‘banish memories’ and ‘calm grief and anger’. I am not sure whether this was medical or recreational. The use of hallucinogens in mystical and ...”

“... Hugo Gernsback invented SF, that the ‘rise of the novel’ is synonymous with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, there is something usefully corrective in the Companion’s counter-claims. They are not the first to be one-sided. It is astonishing, looking back at Ian Watt’s book, for instance, to find that no woman novelist figures in his account. In Michael ...”

“... rate in any recognisable manner, even in his private journals. One is reminded of the comment on Fielding and Hamidullah in A Passage to India: they regretted the death of Mrs Moore, ‘but they were middle-aged men, who had invested their emotions elsewhere, and outbursts of grief could not be expected from them over a slight acquaintance.’ Furbank, who ...”

“... to join ‘the chorus of mere whingers against Theory, all those mouthy conservatives from (say) Helen Gardner . . . to Roger Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new ...”

“... convert to Roman Catholicism, a bestselling author and a tormented nun, very properly named Sister Helen of the Transfiguration, but we don’t have to wait to the end to know about all that; her future is frequently mentioned proleptically. The narrator seems to be looking down on a completed action and picking out events at will; chronological sequence is ...”

“... Empson explained to his publisher Ian Parsons that along with studies of Donne, Joyce and Fielding his work on Milton was designed to show how ‘the neo-Christian movement has greatly upset the natural and traditional way of reading such authors,’ and to ‘challenge’ this heresy. In the event Milton got a whole book to himself. It shows a Milton ...”

“... assembly of flirtatious nymphs and shepherds, into a cavern centred on a statue of Paris abducting Helen, and finally into an inner chamber where a naked Venus is surprised in her bath by sculpted satyrs who would originally have sprayed her with water. But I felt that there must have been more to the grotto boom than subterranean soft porn, and so in August ...”