Vanity Fair: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero

On a broad and colourful canvas, extending from urban and rural England to Waterloo and the continental haunts of exiles, Thackeray gives us one of the greatest social-satirical novels in the language - one of the most entertaining and profound, and, in the person of Becky Sharp, we have one of literature's most resourceful, attractive, and amoral characters. Essentially a commentary on hypocrisy and those ethical principles to which society pays lip-service, Vanity Fair (1847-8) invites us to consider which is to blame: the opportunist or the society that makes opportunism necessary.

Volume editor: J. A. Sutherland