Vanity Fair (RED) (Penguin Red)

by WilliamMakepeaceThackeray (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $3.49

  No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth than the alluring, resourceful Becky Sharp, who ruthlessly clambers up the social ladder while her sweet, sentimental friend Amelia longs for her worthless soldier lover. As fortunes change, and battles are fought at home and abroad, who will survive? Books that save lives come in one colour Choose ( Penguin Classics ) Red, Save Lives Penguin Classics has partnered with (Product) Red to bring you our selection of some of the best books ever written. We will be contributing 50 per cent of the profits from the sale of ( Penguin Classics ) Red editions to the Global Fund to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. Now great books can help save lives.

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.49

  Vanity Fair , Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. The chapter entitled 'How to Live on Nothing' is a classic. Thackeray's subtitle, A Novel Without a Hero , is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But Vanity Fair has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.

• New

  Paperback
  1995

  $18.43

  The text of this Norton Critical Edition of Thackeray's acclaimed 1848 novel is based on the Garland edition, the text approved by the Modern Language Association. The text is fully annotated and is accompanied by all of the author's original illustrations as well as a textual appendix.

• New

  Hardcover
  1991

  $20.48

  Set in the years before and after Waterloo, the novel tells the parallel stories of two schoolfriends - the quiet, long-suffering Amelia and her brilliant, scheming friend, Becky Sharp. The novel portrays all the corruption and decadence of 19th-century England.