Vanity Fair [A Novel Without a Hero] (The Collector's Library of the World's Best-Loved Books)

[xxii], 726 pp. 8vo. Blue 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 Harry Furniss. "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."