Vanity Fair
Thackeray announces a novel without a hero and then provides two women: Becky Sharp, who has no money and considerable nerve, and Amelia Sedley, who has money and very little judgement. The narrator is a gossip who keeps reminding you that he is telling a story, and that his characters are not to be trusted.
The book follows them through Brussels, Waterloo and a decade of social climbing. Its subject is the market in marriages and reputations, and it is funnier and crueller than most Victorian fiction. The final chapter's famous question about vanity is less a moral than an accounting.
Public-domain status
First published in 1848. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; William Makepeace Thackeray died in 1863, so this work has been free to republish there since 1934.
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