Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) FROM OUR EDITORS
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FROM THE PUBLISHER
“I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a
year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the
wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature.
Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate
William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a
wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in
London at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her
wit, charm and considerable sex appeal to escape her drab destiny as a
governess. From London’s ballrooms to the battlefields of
Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of
memorable characters, including her lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his
rich sister, Miss Crawley, and Pitt’s dashing son, Rawdon, the
first of Becky’s misguided sexual entanglements.
Filled with hilarious dialogue and superb characterizations,
Vanity Fair is a richly entertaining comedy that asks the reader,
“Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire?
or, having it, is satisfied?”
Features more than 100 illustrations drawn by Thackeray himself for the initial publication.
Nicholas Dames is Assistant Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is the author of
Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction,
1810–1870, and other commentary on nineteenth-century
British and French fiction.
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