Vanity Fair (Royal Collector's Edition) (Case Laminate Hardcover with Jacket)

by William Makepeace Thackeray

Overview

Vanity Fair follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The two women are ostensibly friends, who are always in opposition to one another: when Amelia falls into a crisis, Becky is moving in the highest circles of society. When Amelia comes into luck, Becky's fortunes plummet. Throughout the novel, Amelia yearns for love, while Becky fights her way up the social ladder.

Vanity Fair reflects Thackeray's interest in deconstructing his era's conventions regarding literary heroism. The characters are all flawed to a greater or lesser degree; even the most sympathetic have weaknesses. The human weaknesses Thackeray illustrates are mostly to do with greed, idleness, and snobbery, and the scheming, deceit and hypocrisy which mask them. Vanity Fair is sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel.

This case laminate collector's edition includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781774766545
Publisher:	Royal Classics
Publication date:	12/20/2022
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.63(d)

About the Author

William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 - 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. Thackeray achieved recognition with his Snob Papers, but the work that really established his fame was the novel Vanity Fair, which first appeared in serialised instalments beginning in January 1847. Even before Vanity Fair completed its serial run Thackeray had become a celebrity, sought after by the very lords and ladies whom he satirised. They hailed him as the equal of Dickens. In Thackeray's own day some commentators, such as Anthony Trollope, ranked his History of Henry Esmond as his greatest work, perhaps because it expressed Victorian values of duty and earnestness, as did some of his other later novels. It is perhaps for this reason that they have not survived as well as Vanity Fair, which satirises those values. During the Victorian era Thackeray was ranked second only to Charles Dickens, but he is now much less widely read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair, which has become a fixture in university courses, and has been repeatedly adapted for the cinema and television.