Vanity Fair

Subtitled ‘A Novel without a Hero,’ Thackeray’s sprawling masterpiece follows the clever, ruthless, and utterly charming Becky Sharp as she claws her way up through Regency England’s high society, contrasted with her gentle, passive friend Amelia Sedley. Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and the Battle of Waterloo, Thackeray paints a vast, satirical panorama of ambition, vanity, money, and social climbing, sparing no one his ironic wit. Becky Sharp remains one of literature’s greatest anti-heroines—amoral, brilliant, and irresistible. Sharp, funny, and unsparing in its view of human folly, Vanity Fair is a towering achievement of the Victorian novel and a merciless mirror of society.