Product Description

This book comes 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11900 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

Customer Reviews

Pure class
It really is that good. How much you like this book will depend to a large extent on how much you like the Victorian novel. If you like Dickens, the Brontes, Elliot and the like, then you are in for a real treat, because Thackeray is the best of the lot. Less verbose and rambling than Dickens, less sentimental than Elliot, more ironic than the Brontes, Thackeray is a supreme writer of English - ironic, cheerful and pessimistic by turns, sometimes tender and affectionate then cruel and caustic, he maintains a narrative control that invites the reader to share his moral vision of the hypocrisies and absurdities of Victorian England, and the world we all inhabit.

Vanity Fair has that universal quality of the best fiction - it enables you to see the world in a new way. An hour reading this novel is time spent with a true comedian, someone who sees the grotesque, humorous, admirable, cruel, stubborn, heroic, gentle etc reality of the human condition and can tell it in chapters of the best English since Shakespeare.

A novel written before its time.
Although a mammoth read, Thackeray has voiced what other Victorian writers felt obliged to conceal. Vanity Fair retains its relevance in today's capitalist consumer society. I believe there is a Becky Sharp lurking within all of us! Best read I have read in the past year.

A fluent and affectionate satire of Victorian society
'Vanity Fair' is a novel which seems to have the power to discourage its reading not simply by the cover, but rather the spine of the book. It can be seen dominating many a bookshelf, such is its size. Do not, however be put off by these 800 pages because it is actually easier to read than many novels only half the size and this is all down to the excellent prose stylings of Thackeray himself. There is not a moment when the writing moves from its accustomed fluidity to the turgid pedantry which characterises some Victorian novelists. On top of this the plot itself is more unified than many other serializations contemporary with its writing. As soon as Becky Sharp rides precociously through the gates of Miss Pinkerton's Academy to begin her career as but a lowly governess the reader recognises the beginnings of a long journey which will examine peaks and troughs of British and continental society. The astuteness and opportunism of Becky herself is matched only by the acuteness of Thackeray in mocking this society, his characters' class-based prejudice and their manifold follies. Set against the violence of Waterloo, Becky's campaign of social climbing is implicitly compared with Napoleon's imperialist adventures. Must such a cynical, calculating rise be followed by an ignominious fall? There is one way to find out, and I urge you to do so.