William Makepeace

Vanity Fair follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848 and is a satirisation of early 19th-century British society.

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Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray

Becky Sharp is a poor orphan when she first makes friends with the lovely Amelia Sedley at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies. She may not have the natural advantages of her companion but she more than makes up for it with her wit, charm, deviousness, and determination to make a success of herself whatever the cost. The story of Becky’s spectacular rise and fall sees her gamble, manipulate, and seduce her way through high society and the Napoleonic wars.

With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull.Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer.Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world.When Vanity Fair was published in 1848, Charlotte Bronte commented: 'The more I read Thackeray'sworks the more certain I am that he stands alone - alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling... Thackeray is a Titan.'

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"Oh! those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts..."

Sitat: 
Self-serving social climber and anti-heroine Becky Sharp will do anything to raise her status and attain wealth and standing with smart society. Clever, lively and resourceful, orphan Becky is the total opposite of her naive and sentimental schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a pampered yet good-natured girl from a wealthy family. As both women build lives for themselves in London, Thackeray decadently satirizes the corruption and flaws of 19th-century English society. 