Vanity Fair
- by William Thackery
Vanity Fair is most often remembered for the powerful characters who take over the story: Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley offer lively considerations of the experience of women making choices in a world where power and freedom is not easily available to them. Thackeray uses the lives of his characters to consider essential questions: “Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied?” Jane Smiley compares VF to its French contemporaries: “I don’t think it is possible to understand Vanity Fair without acknowledging Thackeray’s extensive familiarity with French literature, because this huge novel takes up a Balzacian purpose—to depict English life over a period of twenty years, with an array of characters of all classes, and to depict it with the cool detachment implied equally by the title Vanity Fair as by Balzac’s La Comédie humaine.” The satire of the work—and the critical stance of the narrator—do not diminish the sympathy generated towards Becky as an unlikely heroine. Is the writer’s apparent criticism overcome by his sympathies? Or is his craft more subtle than we may at first understand?