The action of the story extends from about 1814 to the early '30s. The two most virtuous characters, Becky's friend Amelia Sedley, and William Dobbin, a friend of Amelia's husband George Osborne, doomed to a hopeless love for Amelia (who foolishly dotes on the worthless George) are presented as basically good but in different ways rather foolish. And the main character, Becky Sharp, for all that she is one of the best known characters in Victorian literature, is not only not a hero, but is absent from the book for chapters at a time. In Henry Esmond there is no doubt that Henry - for all his faults - is the hero of his narrative (if, perhaps, partly because it is framed as his narrative.) Vanity Fair is framed quite differently - the author (a fairly direct avatar of Thackeray) conceives of himself as a puppeter, manipulating his characters through their decades long adventures. Perhaps some of this is down to the accurate subtitle - A Novel Without a Hero. I will say to begin with that this is an immensely entertaining book - but that I still rank it behind Henry Esmond.

So take my brief look for what it's worth. Numerous trees have given their lives for pieces about the book, professors have told their students what to think for a century and a half, and I'm sure many more illustrious book bloggers than me have weighed in. This is one of those cases where my review is more or less superfluous - Vanity Fair is one of the all time classic English novels. (The novel was serialized in 19 monthly parts in 18. I read it over the next few weeks much, I suppose, as its original readers did - a chapter or two at a time. Upon my retirement from my Locus column, some reading time opened up, and I decided to return to Vanity Fair. And, a bit later, I started reading it - but then set it aside, for reasons to do partly with deadlines, and perhaps also partly the pandemic. I snapped it up cheap at the used bookstore where I saw it, which was, alas, going out of business. But a couple of years ago I found a quite lovely boxed edition, from Random House in 1958, with illustrations by Robert Ball.

Along the way I had bought a couple of used editions of Vanity Fair, with the idea that I'd surely read it someday.

Best thackeray novels