Customer Reviews

Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics)

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Greed, gold-digging and deception sit at the heart of "Vanity Fair." It's no joke that it's subtitled "a novel without a hero" -- William Makepeace Thackeray mercilessly skewered the pretentions and flaws of the upper class all throughout it. The result is a gloriously witty social satire.

It opens with two young women departing from a ladies' academy: dull, sweet Amelia (rich) and fiery sharp-witted Rebecca (poor). Becky Sharp is a relentless social climber, and her first effort to rise "above her station" is by trying to get Amelia's brother to marry her -- an effort thwarted by Amelia's fiancee. So instead she gets married to another family's second son, Rawdon Crawley.

Unfortunately, both young couples quickly get disinherited and George is killed. But Becky is determined to live the good life she has worked and married for -- she obtains jewels and money from admiring gentlemen, disrupting her marriage. But a little thing like a tarnished reputation isn't enough to keep Becky down...

"Vanity Fair" is actually a lot more complex than that, with dozens of little subplots and complicated character relationships. Reading it a few times is necessary to really absorb all of it, since it is not just a look at the two women in the middle of the book, but at the upper (and sometimes lower) social strata of the nineteenth century.

The main flaw of the book is perhaps that it sprawls too much -- there's always a lot of stuff going on, not to mention a huge cast of characters, and Thackeray sometimes drops the ball when it comes to the supporting characters and their little plots. It takes a lot of patience to absorb all of this. However... it's worth it.

Like most nineteenth-century writers, Thackeray had a very dense, formal writing style -- but once you get used to it, his writing becomes insanely funny. Witticisms and quips litter the pages, even if you don't pick them all up at once. At first Thackeray seems incredibly cynical (Becky's little schemes almost always pay off), but taken as a social satire, it's easier to understand why he was so cynical about the society of the time.

Becky Sharp is the quintessential anti-heroine -- she's very greedy and cold, yet she's also so smart and determined that it's hard not to have a grudging liking for her. Certainly life hasn't been fair for her. Next to Becky, a goody-goody character like Amelia is pretty boring, and even the unsubtle George can't measure up to Becky.

To sum up "Vanity Fair": think a period soap opera with a heavy dose of social commentary. In other words, it doesn't get much better than this, Thackeray's masterpiece.

Scholars can make careers out of analyzing this wonderful novel, so I'll comment on the edition I'm reading, the Barnes and Noble full-size paperback. The text size is just within the range of "comfortable" for a middle-aged reader, a feature not easy to find in the great classics.

The footnotes and endnotes greatly enhanced my reading experience, as did the insightful introduction.

I hope more publishers realize that modern readers want to tackle the classics, but we do need help in the form of notes explaining foreign phrases and cultural terms and allusions from another land and time. And we need text large enough to make the reading a pleasure rather than a squinting endurance test. This B&N edition is a winner.

Lord knows there are enough hungry doctors of literature willing to annotate and introduce the classics!

Note that Modern Library Classics full-size paperbacks are also often excellent. In any case, if text size is an issue, better try to examine the actual book before deciding, because even these publishers have a few titles with tiny print.

I assumed this book was some tedious classic, and had never felt any pull to read it. Its immense size and the century of its creation were daunting-- too long, too many words, too long ago. I took it along however on a trip to England and was enthralled. I "could not put it down", i was so drawn into the story and the lovely clear writing. Mr. Thackeray was a wise man who deeply understood a wide range of personalities in all layers of society. A tremendous and lasting achievement in fiction. Almost 200 hundred years old, but fresh and modern in its sympathy for the human spirit and unsparing depiction of social conventions. And very very funny.

I first saw the Reese Witherspoon movie a year ago, not having read the book. I was intrigued, so bought a copy, feeling quite virtuous for having bought a classic novel with the intention of reading it. It took me over a year to get around to reading it, during which time it sat on the shelf silently convicting me of my good intentions to read the classic work. I finally picked it up and decided to try it, to "improve my mind". Boy, was I surprised to find myself laughing and utterly engrossed in it. It is written in a different style of English from that of today, of course, but it is not as difficult to get through as, say, Jane Austen (whose books I do enjoy, so stop shrieking at me, all you JA fans). It is written tongue firmly in cheek and with delightful sarcasm and satire and cynicism. I am about halfway through as I write this and the more I read, the more I'm struck by the resemblance between Becky Sharp and Scarlett O'Hara. I wonder if Margaret Mitchell was a fan of this book?

I urge you to give this book a try, if you want a very funny and witty experience. I am enjoying it very much.

William Makepeace Thackeray gives a brilliantly witty view of society in the 19th century. Though it's about 300 pages too long, if the reader perseveres, he will be rewarded. The character of Becky Sharpe is one of the best in the history of literature.

Rebecca is worse than I remembered from first reading the book in college. A really bad mother, she "hates" her son (Thackeray's word) precisely because she is supposed to love him and she does not. Thackeray is really good on how people turn on people to whom they are obligated, whether by virtue of relationship or by virtue of owing a debt of gratitude for generosity and kindness, the hater justifies his or her lack of heart and ingratitude in making the other out to be the villain. Thackeray is really good on "no good deed goes unpunished".

does Rebecca murder Jos? That's the impression I got.

As bad as Rebecca is, as dishonest, as lying, as thieving, as heartless, as conniving, she at least feels the need to pretend to the world to be good. Her mask slips when she has no need to impress people because they have no power, as when she is mean to Lady Jane. But mostly she feels she must be a hypocrite. That shows the power of morality in those days. You had to at least "assume the virtue" though you had it not (to paraphrase Shakespeare?).

After the big Lord Steyne scandal, Rebecca is exposed. Her attempts to rehabilitate herself fail because as soon as people find out about her, they don't want to associate with her anymore. Today, everyone would say, poor Rebecca is a victim. There would be no scandal or disgrace attached to her, though she were ten times worse.

Thackeray says perhaps with $5,000 a year Rebecca could be a good woman. That sum itself, enormous in those days, shows the lie of that statement. I can be a good woman if I have a million a year, it is like saying. As we see in the book most people are not rich yet not bad like Rebecca.

Dobbin is better than I remembered. He starts out good but stupid. He ends up very intelligent and worthy of respect by that most severe of judges, adolescent youth, in this case Amelia's spoiled son and his friends. Dobbin is the hero of the book. Thackeray could not resist having a hero. Thackeray is cynical, but he is not angry. Thackeray is a critic of human nature. He is not the sort to say I hate the English but rather, unfortunately, people are like this. And just as you think someone is horrid, he shows you that they are not as bad as you think, not as selfish or unfeeling. He is not as cynical as Balzac. He does not break the reader's heart.

Amelia seems to start out like one of Dickens downtrodden and near perfect heroines, like Little Dorrit. But Thackeray lets us see the foolishness and vanity and blindness in Amelia. She is not sentimentalized like Dickens' heroines.

A lot of the book is about female self sacrifice, duty, and devotion which usually goes unappreciated by men and children. But Thackeray does not conclude that this means that women's lives are worse than men's or that they are ultimately less happy. Amelia devotes herself to her father's old age. The duty is hard for her, but she is still happier than her father who dies a failure in his own eyes. But Amelia gets satisfaction out of her devotion and ends happier than her son's grandfather as well, a selfish and resentful man. He wasted his life in anger. Her life was not wasted. She loved and was loved. From Thackeray's panoply of men and women, it is hard to say who is better off. Women in their relationships seem to have more satisfaction than men in theirs or men in their work.

I ordered this book weeks ago. I have not yet received it. I have had a couple of emails from Amazon (one saying they were having trouble locating it, another saying they located a copy but it would be a few weeks until I received it), but still no book.

Vanity Fair is about the adventures of the young Becky Sharp, born to humble circumstances but given certain opportunities to raise herself, which she takes full advantage of, sometimes to her benefit, more often to her detriment. As heroine's go...well...she isn't one, hence the book's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero". It is written as social satire. For a man fully entrenched in Victorianism, the early part of the century provided a great deal of fodder for novel material. But there's nothing funny about it. The Napoleanic War, the fight for Social survival, the harsh realities of a class system, and thrown into this is the avaricious and scheming Becky Sharp, who takes advantage, and with a realism that at times persuades the reader to sympathise with her. In her path, however, she leaves a wake of ruin. Sympathies change, though, as the book progresses, and while, at first, we may have rooted for one non-heroine, by the end, we are rooting for quite another. The book has a happy-ish ending, with a sobering monologue to put all in its place and to cast a shade of reality over it. But one is left, at the conclusion, with the impression that Thackeray rather tired of his characters before he had quite completed his novel. Overall, it was an interesting look into a Victorian gentleman's view of the decades before him, but it is not by any means one of my favourite books of the era.

This was a ground breaking work at the time and is still sadly relevant today in it's depiction of the false values of 'Vanity Fair' ie society. Innocents such as poor Amelia Sedley, the failing merchant's daughter who worships her caddish officer fiance and later husband, George Osborne, are marked out as victims in this world of predators, hypocrits and false idols.

Only people such as Becky Sharp,a bohemian artist's daughter who is determined to advance herself, even at the cost of compromising her reputation with the debauched old Marquis of Steyne, can hold their own in a world of such false values.

While this is called 'a novel without a hero' in fact there is one, of sorts, in the honourable and brave, if clumsy and often ineffectual, Dobbin, who worships both Amelia and George.

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, this is a wide ranging and massive book. I would be dishonest if I didn't admit there are long and often dull digressions, but there are often flashes of brilliance, too.

For instance, this hauntingly evocative description of the battle action at the end of chapter thirty two:-
**Spoiler follows**.

'...Then at last, the English troops rushed from the post for which no enemy had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled. No more firing was heard at Brussels - the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and the cit y; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.'

In fact, I think the novel is too hard on poor George, whose memory Amelia so worships. For sure, his motives are depicted as often inadmirable, but after all, he does sacrifice his chances of a fortune in marrying Amelia, urged on by Dobbin or not. When Becky finally disillusions poor Amelia, she knows only part of the story but speaks with typical authoritativeness. We know more; we have seen George's remorse on the eve of the battle as he writes his last leter because in his foolish infatuation with Becky he has sent her a note asking her to go away with him. Then, he wishes 'the night's work undone' and bitterly regrets his squandeirng his small inheritence and his neglect of Amelia. But Becky doens't know this, and Amelia never seems to find it out...I found this very sad. I have read that Thackeray based Georges to some extent on a friend of whom he was jealous, coveting his wife; and the harshness with which he treats George does seem to point to some such emotional confusion.

Most people are put off this story by the length, but I have to admit to having read it several times myself (! Geek, or what?) Thackeray is often dryly cynical, yet given also to fits of sentimentality; he was perhaps far less the cynic than he might at first seem.

There are flashes of brilliance in it, and bad writing too. There are interesting insights - particularly into the oppression of women.

It is unfortunate that the proprieties of the time forbid Thackeray from making explicit sexual themes in the story. For instance, does Becky have an adulterous relationship with the awful Marquis? Her far more attractive husband Rawdon Crawley certainly believes so to wish to call him out.

Then, does Amelia find Dobbin physically attractive at the end (or does Thackeray refuse to believe that a virtuous woman has such feelings)? We have no way of knowing if she becomes reconciled to his huge feet, clumsiness and the other features she once found so unappealing.

In Vanity Fair the wicked, like Becky Sharp flourish; decent, honourable people fall by the wayside and nobody looks back. Many feminists find Becky sympathetic; not me, but she makes for an intriguing read.

There's a reason VANITY FAIR has been in print for a century and a half. Thackeray's depiction of early 19th century English life is a cross section cutting across all social lines, fulling displaying the feral indifference of an economic system with no safety net for the poor, and in which the wealthy were entitled to all merely by the fact of their existence.

But despite his offhand jeers, it was obviously not Thackeray's intent merely to write some tell all diatribe assailing the foibles and inequities of the British class structure. He has accomplished a lush tableau filled with sharply delineated characters, and fueled by a sure knowledge of psychology and group dynamics.

More to the point: this is pure STORY, I will not analyze plot specifics here as i have no wish to spoil things for the reader -- but I couldn't put it down.

Also interesting to me was how the style became more and more imbued with a tinge of pessimism as it progressed -- the transition is almost imperceptible, and I question whether it was deliberate. Still, if you compare the almost rollicking youthful enthusiasm of the book's opening chapters to the near despair of its later portions, you will clearly see what i mean.

Also sweet is the final sentence, rated by the American Book Review as one of the 100 Best Last Lines: "Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."

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Pearce Hansen is the author of STREET RAISED, available now for the Kindle