Vanity Fair

Two young women leave Miss Pinkerton's academy and step into a world where everything, including people, has a price. Amelia Sedley is gentle, affectionate, and sheltered; Rebecca Sharp is clever, poor, and determined to rise. Around them Thackeray assembles a great comic panorama of early nineteenth-century England: merchants and officers, baronets and governesses, debtors and dandies, all chasing money, rank, and love.

Vanity Fair is a satire with a warm heart and a cold eye. Its narrator is a showman who keeps reminding us that we are watching a performance, and its characters are neither saints nor simple villains. The novel follows marriages, inheritances, campaigns, and scandals across London, Brussels, and the Continent, and it remains one of the funniest and most clear-sighted books of the Victorian age.

This edition is for first-time readers, students, and book clubs. It contains the complete text, a new introduction, a character guide, a summary of the story, notes on major themes, a glossary of period words and phrases, and questions for discussion.