SOURCE: “Women on the Verge of a Self-Help Overdose,” in Wall Street Journal, Vol. CCXXXV, Issue 40, February 25, 2000, p. W8.

In the following review of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Lehmann faults Fielding for trying to skirt around the feminist criticism of her work, while at the same time, continuing to portray Jones as “anachronistic” and “antifeminist.”

In the 1998 bestseller Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding's fictional protagonist seemed a frazzled but sympathetic urban professional everywoman, cracking wise, courting success and—above all—withstanding the trials of singledom in wild lurches of enervating passion and high ambivalence. OK, maybe the satirical intent of the book seemed a little broad, and its gender politics a bit, well, reactionary. But this was literary farce, after all. Wasn't it the point of the book that we should all lighten up about these gender agonies, find the soothing balm of laughter in the...