Vanity Fair

Becky Sharp is a penniless orphan with a quick tongue. She leaves Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies set on climbing the social ladder by whatever means she can find. Her schoolfriend Amelia Sedley is gentler and expects a safe, comfortable life.

Thackeray follows both women through marriage and money troubles, with the Napoleonic Wars looming over them. Scenes range across the Battle of Waterloo, London's drawing rooms and the royal courts abroad.

First issued in monthly parts between 1847 and 1848, the book carries the subtitle "A Novel without a Hero". It is a satire of ambition, snobbery and hypocrisy in early nineteenth-century England. The narrator presents the story as a puppet show and mocks nearly every character in it.

Becky is one of the great antiheroines of English fiction. The loyal, awkward William Dobbin offers a gentler counterweight to her scheming.

For readers new to Victorian fiction, the book is long and digressive, with a very funny narrator who is always ready to interrupt his own tale.