Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray

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.

Vanity Fair is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. A brilliant satire on nineteenth-century English society, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair was listed on the BBC's the Big Read poll of UK's best-loved books. A timeless classic, it has been an inspiration for numerous adaptations across various art forms.