Bridget Jones's Little Red Dress: Chicklit, mass-market popular romance and feminism

I cannot find this online now. There is only an archived trace of a link, now inaccessible.

This article is concerned with the emergence of chicklit, focusing briefly on Helen Fielding, Jane Green and Lisa Jewell as successful examples of the genre, before moving on to look at the effect chicklit has had on Harlequin Mills & Boon‘s decision to launch a new publishing label Red Dress Ink, its indebtedness to the genre, its reasons for differentiating itself in the market and to ask the question: can Harlequin rekindle romance in a post-feminist world? (44)

Red Dress Ink is a new publishing imprint, launched through the eHarlequin website in America with See Jane Date by Melissa Senate (November, 2001) and in the UK in April 2002 with Sarah Mlynowski‘s novel Milkrun. (45)

In the Harlequin romance, the heroine might have sex with the hero, but the point is that he will be the hero, her love will restore him and they will get together in the end. In radically altering this premise, the Red Dress Ink endings are very different. In the novels chosen for this research, the pattern seems to be that the heroine already has an abysmal boyfriend who treats her badly and her journey to self-awareness does not necessarily mean that she will find a replacement. Or else, the heroine serially dates many men, only to find a possible  ̳keeper‘ at the end of the novel. For example, in See Jane Date, Melissa Senate manages to balance romance-novel fantasy with post-feminist realism. Like a typical romance character, the heroine Jane needs to find a date to her cousin‘s wedding at the New York Plaza because she doesn‘t want to be alone. Although the book does not end with a predictable fairy-tale wedding, it does have an epilogue which sees Jane with a "steady boyfriend of ―six months" (Senate, 2001:281) and the likelihood of long-term commitment. In some respects this novel is closer to the Harlequin romance formula than to chick-lit and perhaps this is what makes it popular. (49)