Vanity Fair Reading Order

Vanity Fair (1847-48) by William Makepeace Thackeray is the great English novel of social ambition — a panoramic portrait of English and European society during the Napoleonic Wars organized around two women: Becky Sharp, the clever, ruthless daughter of a drawing-master who climbs as high as ability and luck allow, and Amelia Sedley, the passive, sentimental daughter of a City merchant whose emotional and financial fortunes chart the opposite trajectory. Thackeray subtitled it 'A Novel Without a Hero' and enforced this promise through his narrator's relentless undercutting of every character's claim to moral seriousness — Becky is brilliant but dishonest, Amelia is sincere but blind, and the various men they love and marry are vain, selfish, cowardly, or merely weak. The novel is a sustained exercise in social satire that finds its emotional center unexpectedly in Becky Sharp's determination to survive by any means in a world that would have assigned her to governessing.