<p><strong>With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, <em>Vanity Fair</em> 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.</p>
<p>When <em>Vanity Fair</em> 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.'</p>
Paperback / softback | 720 pages | Published May 1992
