Vanity Fair

Two young women, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, leave Miss Pinkerton s Academy together. They are friends, yet the witty and flirtatious Becky looks set to outdo the passive, sweet-natured Amelia with her ruthless determination to grab what she can in life. And so all kinds of battles and fortunes are won and lost against a backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Thackeray's satire on corruption at every level of English society is rightly subtitled a novel without a hero', since none of its characters have improved themselves by the end. However, it was a success from its first appearance in 1847 and remains one of the greatest comic novels.