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Vanity Fair

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Vanity Fair Synopsis

Vanity Fair, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different:

  • Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals
  • and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband
  • when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. (The chapter entitled "How to Live on Nothing" is a classic.) Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero," is understating the case
  • his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But VANITY FAIR has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780140620856
Publication date:
Author: William Makepeace Thackeray
Publisher: Penguin Classics an imprint of Penguin Adult
Format: Paperback
Pagination: 672 pages
Series: Penguin Popular Classics
Genres: Biography, Literature and Literary studies
Classic fiction: general and literary

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