Chick Lit, AGAIN
Alert AustenBlog Reader Lorraine sent us a link to an article at CBC.ca about chick lit masquerading as non-fiction. There is a passing mention of Jane Austen, and yes, it compares her work to chick lit, but it’s not so bad, really.
The moniker “chick lit” entered the vernacular around 1998, when Helen Fielding – then a columnist for London’s Independent – adapted her newspaper creation Bridget Jones to book format; the Oxford English Dictionary included the phrase as of 2002. Bridget is a chain-smoking, futilely self-bettering Londoner with a knack for creative semantics (”My flobby body flobbering around…”). Fielding dropped her loveable character into a version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — appropriately so, since Austen is an early incarnation of chick lit at its best, if chick lit simply means women’s lives in close-up.
Emphasis ours. See, that definition we can live with. 
But Fielding, as astute an observer of social class as Austen, was actually writing satire. Bridget’s “wobbly bits” and “singleton” obsessions were Sloane Square silliness, gently mocked.
Well, perhaps if you’re the kind of American who hasn’t read Jane Austen… 
Thanks for the link, Lorraine!
