Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (The 100 Greatest Books of All Time)

xviii, 726 pp. 8vo. Original green full leather, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, silk moire endpapers, ribbon marker bound in. Thackeray's satirical tale of a middle-class family that takes in a conwoman, with illustrations by the author. "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."