Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)

This week, we enter the swirling, satirical social landscape of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 masterpiece, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, this expansive novel takes its name from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, portraying London society as a perpetual fairground of folly, greed, and moral corruption. The story brilliantly contrasts the lives of two young women: the manipulative, ruthlessly ambitious, and impoverished orphan, Becky Sharp, and the sweet, sheltered, and tragically naïve Amelia Sedley. We follow Becky's relentless climb up the social ladder, using her wit and charm to overcome her lack of fortune, even as the seemingly virtuous Amelia falls prey to the world's harsh realities. Thackeray uses his famous, intrusive narrator to offer biting commentary on class snobbery, hypocrisy, and the eternal human obsession with status and wealth, asserting that in the great Vanity Fair, true virtue is often overlooked in favor of glittering superficiality.