Vanity Fair
VANITY FAIR, Thackeray`s satirical, panoramic saga of corruption in all classes of English society, stars perhaps the most maddening, amoral, and attractive heroine in literature. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, it chronicles the lives of Becky Sharp, an orphan without resources except for her native wit, and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, 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, leading a high life in London solely on the basis of their clever schemes. (Thackeray`s chapter, How to Live on Nothing, is a classic.) In the end, Becky and Rawdon part when he discovers her infidelity, and she takes her chances on the continent, while Amelia marries an old devoted suitor--not, we gather, a happy ending for her. Thackeray`s view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak, but VANITY FAIR is also one of the great comic novels of all time.

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