Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair is a novel by the English writer William Makepeace Thackeray, serialized from 1847 to 1848 and published in a single volume in 1848 under the subtitle A Novel without a Hero. Set during and after the Napoleonic Wars, it follows two contrasting women, the poor, cunning and socially ambitious Becky Sharp, who schemes her way from governess to the fringes of high society through wit and calculated manipulation, and her school friend Amelia Sedley, a gentle, passive woman whose devotion to her vain husband George Osborne, killed at the Battle of Waterloo, leaves her impoverished and largely unable to act in her own interest. Around them Thackeray arranges a wide cast including Amelia's loyal, unrequited admirer William Dobbin and Becky's dashing but feckless husband Rawdon Crawley, using their intertwined fortunes to satirize the vanity, snobbery and mercenary self-interest of English society across every social rank the novel touches. Thackeray took his title from the worldly, corrupting fair described in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, framing the novel's entire social world as a marketplace of vanity rather than a setting for conventional heroism. Vanity Fair is often credited as a principal founding work of the Victorian novel of social satire and remains one of the most widely read English novels of its period.