Helen Fielding Books in Order

If you want the full Bridget Jones arc: Bridget Jones's Diary → The Edge of Reason → Bridget Jones's Baby → Mad About the Boy.
If you prefer a lighter, companion read: Bridget Jones's Diary → Bridget Jones's Guide to Life.
If you want her standalone novels first: Cause Celeb → Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination.

Helen Fielding grew up in Morley, a textile town just outside Leeds in northern England. She went on to become a journalist, novelist and screenwriter best known for creating Bridget Jones, the funny, flawed diarist whose voice reshaped modern romantic comedy.(en.wikipedia.org)

She was born in 1958, the daughter of a textile factory manager, and went to Wakefield Girls' High School, a background that kept her close to both working life and academic ambition.(en.wikipedia.org)

Fielding read English at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she joined the Oxford Revue and took a student comedy show to the Edinburgh Festival, meeting other young writers and performers along the way.(en.wikipedia.org)

After graduating in 1979, she joined the BBC as a researcher on the news magazine Nationwide and later moved into producing and directing entertainment and documentary programmes. In the mid 1980s she helped launch Comic Relief with a live broadcast from a refugee camp in eastern Sudan, work that fed directly into her first novel, Cause Celeb, about aid workers in a fictional East African country.(en.wikipedia.org)

Throughout the 1990s Fielding wrote as a journalist and columnist for national papers including The Sunday Times, The Independent and The Telegraph. When The Independent asked her to write about single life in London under her own name, she instead created an anonymous diarist, Bridget Jones, whose weekly worries about work, dating, drinking and calorie counts quickly struck a nerve with readers.(en.wikipedia.org)

Those columns became the basis for Bridget Jones's Diary, published in the mid 1990s, which grew from modest hardback sales into a paperback bestseller in many countries. A film adaptation followed, the first of several movies she helped script, and Bridget soon became shorthand for the gap between how people think they are supposed to live and the messier reality of everyday life.(en.wikipedia.org)

Fielding has since returned to Bridget at different stages of adulthood in The Edge of Reason, Mad About the Boy and Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries, following her heroine through long term relationships, unexpected motherhood and the challenges of middle age. Alongside the diaries she has written the aid world satire Cause Celeb, the spoof self help manual Bridget Jones's Guide to Life and the comic spy adventure Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination.(en.wikipedia.org)

On screen, Fielding has been part of the writing team for all four Bridget Jones films, working with directors and actors to keep Bridget's voice consistent as the stories moved from page to cinema. Away from fiction she supports a range of charities, serving as an ambassador for child focused work in Yorkshire and for medical and humanitarian projects in parts of Africa.(en.wikipedia.org)

She now divides her time between London and Los Angeles and has two children with her late partner, television writer and producer Kevin Curran.(en.wikipedia.org)

Again and again, Fielding has said that Bridget works because she captures the space between how people think they ought to behave and the more chaotic, hopeful way they actually muddle through their days.(en.wikipedia.org)