Here's something funny. Helen Fielding has another book about Bridget Jones coming out soon -- titled, Mad About The Boy. I caught a glimpse of a couple spoilers in a review of it, and it made me realize something that Helen Fielding has set her characters up for.

See, she named the hero Mark Darcy after Mr. Darcy from Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice -- as most of her readers know, of course. This connection is deeply impressed upon everybody by the fact that the movie stars Colin Firth as Mark Darcy... and Colin Firth also played the role of the original Mr. Darcy in the recent make of Pride & Prejudice. He plays both Darcys. It's one of those things that readers and viewers often like very much.

Well, at the same time Fielding has connected her characters with another legend as well -- but it's from the world of science fiction, rather than romance novels. I don't know if she meant to or not but she is surely aware of it. It's something invented by Philip Jose Farmer in his novel Tarzan Alive.

At the front of Tarzan Alive there is a family tree(s) -- of about 18 unrelated people. At the end of it, you see the descendants include Tarzan himself (6th Earl of Greystoke), Doc Savage (Clark Savage, Jr.), & Lord Peter Wimsey. If you look at the very top of the family trees, you'll see that one of those original 18 individuals is -- Fitzwilliam Darcy. Yes, this is Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy.

Mr. Darcy, Farmer claims in this novel, is one of the Wold Newton people. And then he tells you in the book what the heck that means:

A group of people in about 1795 were traveling by coach in an area of England called Wold NEwton, when a meteor plunged thru the atmosphere and exposed them all to radiation. I don't know if they showed much of the effect during their lifetimes, but they passed on a bunch of mutations to certain of their descendants: Genius IQs, remarkable physical strength, and deductive skills, to start with.

Since Farmer wrote that book, writers have kept adding to the family trees so that more and more of our favorite fictional characters -- good OR evil -- are related to one of the original Wold Newton family.

I love this sort of thing, how writers can claim they're writing the "history" of pretend people, and present "evidence." Not only Sherlock Holmes is in the Wold Newton Universe, but so is Moriarty, since some author decided he should be. Fu Manchu was added; so was the Lone Ranger, and that means his nephew The Green Hornet gets in too. I have no idea how many people have been tacked onto this meta-story.

So, anyway, Helen Fielding has provided not only a bloodline connection to Fitzwilliam Darcy, but she may have provided this other thing too -- the children of Bridget and Mark Darcy inherit the genetic mutation, so it might be expressed in them. They could be super-powered.

The Wold Newton family connection has been the "radioactive spider bite"* background story to explain how dozens of fictional characters got their skills.

*The famous Spider-Man got his powers from being bitten by a spider which was accidentally irradiated in a lab experiment.