
Vanity Fair
1848 · 951 pages
Becky Sharp leaves school with no money and claws her way through English society while her friend Amelia wastes her love on a worthless man. Thackeray spares nobody, and Becky is magnificent company.
★ 7.2

Becky Sharp leaves school with no money and claws her way through English society while her friend Amelia wastes her love on a worthless man. Thackeray spares nobody, and Becky is magnificent company.

A spectre is haunting Europe, Marx and Engels announce, then read all recorded history as class struggle and hand the workers of the world a program. No pamphlet has moved more people.

Helen Graham bolts her bedroom door against a drunk husband, takes her son, and lives by selling paintings. Victorian reviewers called it coarse and unfit to put in a girl's hands.