Vanity Fair, W.M. Thackeray
Vanity Fair, W.M. Thackeray
List: $23.00 | Sale: $16.10
Club: $11.50

Vanity Fair

Author: W. M. Thackeray

Narrator: Jane Lapotaire

Abridged: 6 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Naxos

Published: 06/01/2000

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

Vanity Fair, with its rich cast of characters, takes place on the snakes-and-ladders board of life. Amelia Sedley, daughter of a wealthy merchant, has a loving mother to supervise her courtship. Becky Sharp, an orphan, has to use her wit, charm, and resourcefulness to escape from her destiny as a governess. This she does ruthlessly, musing’I think I could become a good woman, if I had £5000 a year.’ Thackeray’s story is set at the time of the battle of Waterloo, in which the Sedley fortunes are lost – and Amelia is back to square one – while Becky rises with contemptuous ease.

Reviews

Here I am, 54 years old, and for the very first time reading William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. "Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero." I disagree with Thackeray. The 'Hero' of Vanity Fair is the steadfast and stalwart William Dobbin; of that there is no doubt. This novel is not the coming of......more

Written in 1848, Vanity Fair is an excellent satire of English society in the early 19th Century. Thackeray states several times that it is a novel "without a hero",and at a couple of points tries to claim that Amelia, a good person but who inevitably comes across as rather wishy-washy, is the her......more

Goodreads review by Kelly

"But as we are to see a great deal of Amelia, there is no harm in saying, at the outset of our acquaintance, that she was a dear little creature. And a great mercy it is, both in life and in novels, which (and the latter especially) abound in villains of the most sombre sort that we are to have for......more

Goodreads review by Paul

1. I liked the company of Thackeray who is breezy, ebullient and cynical about everyone’s motives. And he’s very confident too. He thinks he knows everything, although there’s not a word about how the poor live here, that’s not his subject. So he’s like the mid-19th century version of Tom Wolfe or J......more

The author makes his presence known towards the end of the book. It was both eerie and uncanny. He kept breaking the fourth wall, then he conjured that apparition of his in one of the last chapters. Vanity Fair contains no real heroes. That was a fact that Thackeray himself stated, and who am I to di......more