THE good thing about Bridget Jones is that she is 32. The fictional heroine of Helen Fielding's brilliantly successful column/novel/film might act like a particularly irritating 15-year-old and make you long to slap her silly self-indulgent face, but that's not the point. She is, in fact, a grown woman in the market for a man.

And this is a great breakthrough. In a previous generation at her age she would have long been consigned to the shelf or the circle of elderly spinsters. Even Jane Austen, particularly kind to older heroines, had most of them married off while still comfortably in their twenties. Heroines of romantic novels were invariably in their teens or not much older. Now youth has stretched at least an extra half a generation. The grown-up singleton still in with a chance of romance is a fact of life as well as fiction. I had a recent shock while reading a series of comic novels, popular in the 1950s, that followed the heroine from flirtation through marriage and motherhood, then, inevitably, through the tribulations of her daughter's wedding. In the last one, the mother wrote like an old woman - or a very middle-aged one at least - so I did a double-take at the end when, the wedding finally over, she wrote that now she would have to get back to humdrum life and the looming landmark of her 40th birthday. Mother and daughter had got married at 18, quite common for all classes 50 years ago.

At 40, that bright light novelist was consigning herself to the scrapheap. Half a century on today's 40-year-olds are barely grown up, still in the market for love, romance adventure and first babies. In fact, there's a whole genre of "middle-aged " novels, written by and about women in their forties and fifties, who are getting out of unsatisfactory marriages, easing themselves of the responsibility of their grown children and getting themselves a new life and a new man and possibly a new - or even first - baby too. We are younger for longer.

Come to think of it, Mrs Bennett in Pride and Prejudice was probably only a few years older than Bridget Jones. If Jane Austen was writing these days, Mrs Bennett's main occupation would no longer be getting her daughters married off - she'd lock Mr Bennett in his study and be off down the singles bar herself.

Well how kind, Mr Darcy - a large vodka and a bottle of Chardonnay please...

IT'S easy to feel sympathetic for Caroline Aherne when she says she's tired of living a public life, appearing on television and on gossip pages. She's suffered bouts of depression and a battle with alcohol and longs only to be a private person again.

Ummm, yes... but if she's that sick of publicity, why did she make her announcement in an interview and a colour spread in Hello? Or is it only publicity that she doesn't get paid for that she doesn't like?

ALISON Holley has spent the last 12 years as a full-time mother, looking after three children aged between six and 12. She is a committee member of the campaigning group Full Time Mothers, which aims to promote the understanding of a child's needs for a full-time mother. As such, she's had plenty of criticisms from working mothers.

Now Mrs Holley is standing as a Tory candidate in the general election - and she's being accused of hypocrisy (a) because she's going for a full time and (b) because, say Labour women, the Conservatives have few policies to balance home and work.

Whether she succeeds or not, Mrs Holley can't win. It all goes to show, as always, that a mother's place is in the wrong.

Published: Wednesday, April 11, 2001