Vanity Fair Thackerays 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. Beckys fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelias 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.) Thackerays 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.
