Author of the week: Helen Fielding

last updated 8 January 2015

Helen Fielding might as well have killed off a real person, said Radhika Jones in Time. Last month, when the U.K.’s Sunday Times published an excerpt of Fielding’s new Bridget Jonesnovel,readers were horrified to learn that Mark Darcy, Bridget’s aloof but noble husband, had died some years before the new story’s start. Fans took to Twitter to express their shock, but at least one Darcy partisan had been given advance notice. Fielding says she had reached out to actor Colin Firth, who played Darcy in the movie adaptations of the first two Bridget Jones books, and tried but failed to arrange a lunch with him. “I ended up telling him he died on the phone,” she says. “I had to ask him if he had someone with him and if he was sitting down. I was almost saying, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’”

Otherwise, Fielding shows little remorse about her decision, said Emma Barnett in BBC.com. For Mad About the Boy, the first Bridget Jones novel in 14 years, Fielding wanted to open in a minor key, and thus decided that the book would draw from her own experience as a single mother. But while singlehood for the now 55-year-old author came by way of a breakup, she concluded that throwing a divorce into Bridget Jones’s saga would be a greater betrayal of her readers’ trust than embracing the next most obvious solution. “Mark Darcy would never leave her—he’s too much of a gentleman,” she says. “It is far better that his memory lives on untarnished in the new book than he turns out to be a bit of an f-wit.”