''Actually, I just stole the plot from Pride and Prejudice,'' says Fielding, 40. ''I thought it had been very well market-researched over a number of centuries.'' In truth, Fielding, now hard at work on the inevitable sequel -- ''We'll see what happens when someone like Bridget actually gets the guy'' -- developed Jones as an eponymous column for Britain's The Independent. ''At the time,'' she recalls, ''I thought it was too embarrassing, so I just made up this character. I didn't admit I was the writer until people began praising the column.''
A journalist and novelist (she's equally proud of her first book, Cause Celeb, a satire about charity workers set in Africa, ''only nobody bought that one''), Fielding is single and London-based, but she is not, as she likes to remind readers, Bridget Jones. Still, she will admit that international success has brought life alarmingly closer to art. ''I've gone from being this rather frantically disorganized journalist to someone who gets to fly around the world,'' she says. ''Now I'm always frantically fighting to turn up on time. So, I guess I'm more like Bridget every day.''
Considering that Fielding titled the first chapter of her book ''An Exceptionally Bad Start,'' things have turned out rather well. Or, as Bridget might say, ''Hah! Excellent progress.''
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