Vanity Fair (Annotated)

Vanity Fair (1847–48), subtitled "A Novel without a Hero," is Thackeray's panoramic satire of early nineteenth-century British society, following the brilliant, unscrupulous Becky Sharp and the gentle, conventional Amelia Sedley through love, war, debt, ambition, and social performance. Written with an intrusive, ironic narrator and the theatrical imagery of a puppet show, the novel belongs to the...