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Vanity Fair

A Novel Without a Hero

by William Makepeace Thackery

Summary

VANITY FAIR, Thackeray's 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. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's 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.) Thackeray's 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.

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Media Reviews

"'Vanity Fair', though it does not include the whole extent of Thackeray's genius, is the most vigorous exhibition of its leading characteristics. In freshness of feeling, elasticity of movement, and unity of aim, it is favorably distinguished from its successors, which too often give the impression of being composed of successive accumulations of incidents and persons, that drift into the story on no principle of artistic selection and combination....Take from 'Vanity Fair' that special element of interest which comes from Thackeray's own nature, and it would lose the greater portion of its fascination. It is not so much what is done, as the way in which is is done, that surprises and delights; and the manner is always inimitable, even when the matter is common."    -- Edwin Percy Whipple

   -- Atlantic Monthly

"In the early numbers of that work he kept the secret at once of his plans-if he had any-and of his power. So poor were the beginnings of the tale that the subsequent numbers ran a great chance of being thrown aside on the faith of the early ones...It was interesting to see how the writer's power grew and accumulated by its own exercise. Number after number of the work seemed to present a new strength drawn out and nourished by the strength of that which preceded. No reader could have pre-pictured the final mastery of hand from the feeble workmanship that laid the first inadequate foundations of that remarkable book."

   -- Athenaeum (London), 19th-century

"There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very middling indeed; some love-making for the sentimental, and some light comic business; the whole accompanied by appropriate scenery, and brilliantly illuminated with the Author's own candles."    -- William Makepeace Thackeray

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: New Amer Library
Published date: 1983
Size: 4.25 x 7 inches
Weight: 0.85 pounds

Publisher's Notes

The story of English society in the early nineteenth century.

Other Editions

• Hardcover Reissue - Random House Inc (1991) - from $1.17
• Paperback - Penguin USA (2004) - from $1.00

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