Bridget Jones

The films adapt Helen Fielding's novels one for one, and Fielding co-wrote the first two screenplays herself. The casting made the lineage explicit: Colin Firth plays Mark Darcy, having played Darcy in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice that Fielding's novel is openly rewriting.

The timing is the evidence. Fielding was writing the Independent column that became the novel while the BBC serial was airing and the country was talking about it, and she has said the book is a straight lift of Austen's plot on the grounds that Austen had already done the structural work. She named the hero Mark Darcy. Four years later the films cast Colin Firth, the serial's Darcy, in the part, which is the borrowing acknowledged on screen.

The second Bridget Jones novel, The Edge of Reason, is Persuasion the way the first is Pride and Prejudice, and Fielding has said so. Austen's plot supplies it: a woman talked out of the right man by people who claim to know better, years of regret handled as comedy, and a reunion engineered by a misunderstanding about somebody else's engagement. Filed MEDIUM rather than HIGH because it is a claim about one volume inside the series rather than about the whole of it.