Book description
With a selection of letters by Charlotte Bront .
'Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world?
Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?'
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly
success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her
impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her
sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier
George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour
of Regency society, battles - military and domestic - are fought,
fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable figure in
this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing
pathos and depth to Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love and
social adventure.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in
1811, but was sent to England at the age of six. After his education at
Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, having gambled away much of
his fortune at university, he settled in Paris and tried a career as a
painter. It was here that he met nineteen-year-old Isabella Shawe, upon
whom he based many of his virtuous but weak heroines, and whom he
married in 1836, before returning to London with her a year later. He
was a novelist and journalist, writing prolifically for numerous
periodicals and magazines -
Vanity Fair
was first published as a twenty-part serial in
Punch
in 1847-8 - and becoming editor of the newly established
Cornhill
Magazine
in 1860. Thackeray, who had a penchant for eating and drinking heavily
and led a generally unhealthy lifestyle, died suddenly of a stroke in
1863.
