Vanity Fair.

Welcome to the great fair of the world, where everything is for sale and everyone is on the make. William Makepeace Thackeray subtitled Vanity Fair a novel without a hero, and offers instead a dazzling, disenchanted panorama of a society in love with itself.

What it's about

Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and the fashionable world that carries on around them, the novel follows two contrasting young women: the clever, unscrupulous, endlessly resourceful Becky Sharp, determined to climb by any means, and her gentle, trusting friend Amelia Sedley. Through marriages, fortunes made and lost, and the shifting theatre of English society, their fates unfold under the author's watchful, ironic eye.

Themes

Thackeray dissects social climbing, hypocrisy, the tyranny of money and the vanity that dresses itself as virtue. His satire spares almost no one, yet it is laced with a rueful tenderness for human folly.

Why it still matters

Becky Sharp remains one of fiction's most magnetic anti-heroines, and the novel's mordant view of status and self-interest feels perennially apt. Its scale and wit set a standard for the social panorama.

Who it's for

Readers who relish sharp satire, unforgettable characters, and a grand sweep of nineteenth-century society will find Thackeray's fair endlessly entertaining.

Sources and references

Verified references for this edition: Open Library, WorldCat.