Vanity Fair A Novel Without a Hero

Vanity Fair is considered one of the five best novels in English and the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel. Written by William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair was first published in 1848. The novel follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The story is framed as a puppet play and the narrator, despite being an authorial voice, is notoriously unreliable. In its satire of early 19th-century British society, William Makepeace Thackeray does not hold a mirror up to life; he holds up a warped and twisted reflector that gives the life it reflects a half comic, half satirical aspect. Thackeray is a master of English; his flexible sentences adapt themselves like running water to every circumstance, flowing and shifting so easily from pathos to humor, from tragedy to comedy, from satire to sympathy; and in 'Vanity Fair' his style is at its best.