Vanity Fair (Wordsworth Collection)

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 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.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863) was an English writer. His finest work, 'Vanity Fair', brought him fame, and comparisons with Dickens. The novel has retained its perennial appeal, and is widely considered to be one of the finest written during the nineteenth century.