Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. 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.