The roots of the chick-lit genre

Arguably, chick lit texts are enmeshed in the present. However, in many ways, these novels, and the approaches taken by chick lit novelists, are not remarkably new. Rather, their roots are in the heroine-centered novels of the nineteenth century, novels like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Helen Fielding herself acknowledged her debt to such nineteenth-century authors such as Jane Austen in an interview for Time where she noted that she did indeed structure her novel after Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “Yes. I shamelessly stole the plot. I thought it had been very well market researched over a number of centuries.” In “Mothers of Chick Lit: Women Writers, Readers, and Literary History,” Juliette Wells discusses these connections between nineteenth-century women’s fiction and chick lit, while critic Stephanie Harzewski in “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners” more specifically analyzes the structural similarities between chick lit and the novel of manners. Harzewski also explores the connections between chick lit, prose romance, and popular romance, noting how the genre relies on the conventions of the romance, but updates them for its present day setting. And, as noted earlier, chick lit also draws upon the female-centered fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Imelda Whelehan’s The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City connects the genre to Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying as well as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977).

Chick lit authors are not the first women writers to connect their novels to contemporary popular culture mediums. In Northanger Abbey (1818), Austen explores the impact that Gothic fiction had upon her heroine Catherine Moreland; Edith Wharton mentions Tiffany & Co. in The House of Mirth (1905); American writer Sylvia Plath chronicles Esther Greenwood’s summer spent interning for the fictional Ladies’ Day magazine in ''The Bell Jar'' (1962); contemporary African American writer Toni Morrison’s details her character Claudia’s passionate hate for Shirley Temple in ''The Bluest Eye'' (1970); and author Diane Johnson, concludes her novel, ''Le Divorce'' (1997) with an actionpacked scene set in EuroDisney. Women writers have a long history of connecting their fiction with consumer culture, and in some ways, chick lit novels are merely continuing that trend with their direct references to magazines, self-help books, romantic comedies, and domestic-advice manuals. In these ways, then, chick lit is linked to the literary traditions that preceded it.

One of the major factors for chick lit’s popularity rests with the television and film productions of chick lit texts, which have enabled an even larger audience to be exposed to the genre. The trajectory of Bridget Jones’s Diary attests to this fact. Fielding’s novel developed out of her newspaper column in the Independent, which first ran on February 28, 1995. Two years after its publication in England, the novel traveled to the United States, where it became a bestseller. In light of this favorable reception, Miramax films produced the film in 2001; Fielding wrote the screenplay herself while her friend Sharon Maguire directed and Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant starred (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”). Similarly, Candace Bushnell, author of ''Sex and the City'' transformed her newspaper column for the New York Observer into a collection that was then adapted into the HBO series, premiering in June of 1998 . In 2001, Laura Zigman’s Animal Husbandry was developed into the film Someone Like You starring Ashley Judd, Greg Kinnear, and Hugh Jackman (“Someone Like You”).

These adaptations have contributed to an even more wide-scale consumption of these texts and their transformation into popular culture relics. In “The Marriage Mystique,” Daphne Merkin describes Fielding’s novel as “the cultural artifact that is recognizably larger than itself ”. As Merkin acknowledges, today Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones herself have become something other than what Fielding may have first conceptualized to both the British and American public. Merkin’s description can just as readily be applied to Sex and the City, an equally influential twenty-first century cultural phenomenon. Loosely defined, chick lit, which arguably began with Fielding’s text (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”), consists of heroine-centered narratives that focus on the trials and tribulations of their individual protagonists. At its onset, the genre was narrowly defined in that the protagonists depicted in these texts were young, single, white, heterosexual, British and American women in their late twenties and early thirties, living in metropolitan areas.

Reading List:

• Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
• Jemima J - Jane Green
• Can You Keep a Secret? - Sophie Kinsella
• Confessions of a Shopaholic - Sophie Kinsella
• Twenties Girl - Sophie Kinsella
• Accidental IT Girl - Libby Street
• Confessions of a Beauty Addict - Nadine Haobsh
• The Carrie Diaries - Candace Bushnell
• The Only Way is Up - Carole Matthews
• Last Night at Chateau Marmont - Lauren Weisberger
• V.I.P.- Lauren Weisberger
• The Devil Wears Prada- Lauren Weisberger
• PS, I Love You  - Cecelia Ahern
• One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell