When literary characters take on a life of their own

As Bridget Jones herself might say to any doubters – with tongue only slightly in cheek – "shut up please. I am very busy and important".

Last week, the latest film in the much-loved series chronicling the hilarious mishaps, mayhem and, well, men in Bridget’s life helped Working Title, the production company behind the series, tip its total earnings from the UK box office since it was founded in 1983 over the US$1 billion (Dh3.67bn) mark. Which suggests that it might have been an oversight the size of Bridget’s famously large pants to take 12 years to come up with the third instalment, Bridget Jones’s Baby.

There had been a third book to adapt for a while. It’s called Mad About the Boy, and Helen Fielding wrote it three years ago. The problem is, Bridget’s husband Mark Darcy is dead and she’s struggling to cope as a 50-something widow with two children. Depressingly, you can see why studios might have thought it wasn’t exactly the film to strike comedy gold at the box-­office.

So the publication of Bridget Jones: The Baby Diaries this week says a lot about how the much-loved character has moved from being an enjoyably acerbic literary character to a film franchise. Fielding co-wrote the screenplay first, and novelised the tale of a 43-year-old Bridget finding out she is pregnant and unsure of the father, later.

Still, it’s a "sort-of" new book in a series that has sold millions of copies around the world, so its publication on October, 11 will still be an event, so much so that publisher Jonathan Cape refused to release advance copies. But it also suggests the big-screen Bridget Jones, played by Renée Zellweger, has become more important to its author than the original print Bridget, who first appeared in a newspaper column 21 years ago.

"You do have to divorce yourself from the series, but Brenda is so strong," she said. "I wrote some backstory that’s not actually in the books – which was lovely to do – because Brenda wanted to create a history for her. So it’s natural that I sometimes hear Brenda’s voice when I’m writing ­dialogue."

Vera Stanhope and Bridget Jones have certainly joined that exclusive club of literary characters who no longer need to be tethered to the books they originally appeared in to enthral and endure, alongside other favourites such as Ian Fleming’s James Bond, and Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne. Because these franchises are so strong, it doesn’t really matter that Skyfall wasn’t based on a book by Fleming or that this year’s Jason Bourne bears little resemblance to Ludlum’s books – and given those authors are long dead, any fidelity to their creations feels less of an issue.