Vanity Fair (Wordsworth Classics)

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.

When Vanity Fair was published in 1848, Charlotte Brontë commented: 'The more I read Thackeray'sworks the more certain I am that he stands alone - alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling... Thackeray is a Titan.'

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720 pages

Average rating: 6.83

12 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

crabbyabbe
Aug 31, 2023
8/10 stars
“All is vanity, nothing is fair.“ After 912 pages and 67 chapters, that pretty much is the main theme. I can see why this is Thackeray's masterpiece as he scathingly criticizes the norms in early 19th-century England between rich vs. poor, women vs. men, religion vs. non-religion ... nobody is immune from his satire. A different type of narrator, too, where you felt like he was addressing you personally for a LONG story. He could have chopped off some chapters, though, and kept to the main plot because it was overwhelmingly verbose at times. Overall, I am glad I read it and immensely enjoyed most of it.

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