Vanity Fair (Wordsworth Classics)

by Dr Keith Carabine (Series Editor), William Makepeace Thackeray (Author), Owen Knowles (Introduction)

• New

  Paperback
  1992

  $7.10

  With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull. 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. When Vanity Fair was published in 1848, Charlotte Bronte commented: 'The more I read Thackeray'sworks the more certain I am that he stands alone - alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling...Thackeray is a Titan.'

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $4.24

  A classic, set during the Napoleonic wars, giving a satiricl picture of a worldly society and revolving around the exploits of two women from very different backgrounds.

• New

  Hardcover
  1991

  $19.44

  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.