Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray is a novel satirizing middle-class English society of the early 19th century.

Plot

The story opens at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for young ladies, where we meet the protagonists Becky Sharp, an intelligent and cunning young woman determined to make her way in society, and Amelia Sedley a good natured and kind rich girl. The book accompanies Becky and Amelia's life through happy times and sorrow days between London, Brighton, the countryside and... Battle of Waterloo.

Criticism

With a very few exceptions, none of the characters in the novel are good; they are all flawed in very human ways. Vanity Fair can be seen as an exposition of human flaws (vanity itself being chief among them) and paints a fairly bleak view of the human condition.

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Vanity Fair is also the name of a large-circulation American gossip magazine. See Vanity Fair magazine[?].