SOURCE: “Inside, Outside,” in New Republic, Vol. 219, No. 10, September 7, 1998, pp. 36–41.

In the following review, Shalit praises Bridget Jones's Diary for its examination of popular culture and the position of single women in contemporary society.

In the mid-1970s, during the juvenescence of academic feminism, a clutch of socially-minded theorists, poets, and other progressive critics of the canon set out to rectify the “silencing” of the first-person female confessional. Writers such as Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, and Nancy Mairs argued that female subjectivity, narrativity, and interiority had been devalued and squelched by patriarchy. Whereas the male writer was literally the author of his being—“insert[ing] his own text forcefully into the world-text,” as Mairs subtly put it—a woman aspiring to promulgate her private self had a more difficult road to tread. Overburdened with domestic tasks, taught to subdue her passions and to put others’ needs first, she...