Böcker av William Makepeace Thackeray

Set during the Napoleonic wars, Vanity Fair follows Becky Sharp as she cuts a swathe through Regency society. War, money, and national identity are the themes of Thackeray's great satirical novel, as it exposes a world on the make. In Becky, Thackeray created one of the most memorable female characters in Victorian fiction.

Set in the second half of the eighteenth century, Barry Lyndon is the fictional autobiography of an adventurer and rogue whom the reader is led to distrust from the very beginning. Born into the petty Irish gentry, and outmanoeuvred in his first love-affair, a ruined Barry joins the British army. After service in Germany he deserts and, after a brief spell as a spy, pursues the career of a gambler in the dissolute clubs and courts of Europe. In adetermined effort to enter fashionable society he marries a titled heiress but finds he has met his match. First published in 1844, Barry Lyndon is Thackeray's earliest substantial novel and in some ways his most original, reflecting his views of the true art of fiction: to represent a subject, however unpleasant, with accuracy and wit, and not to moralize. The text is that of George Sainsbury's 1908 Oxford edition which restores passages cut when the novel was revised in 1856. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year' Becky Sharp is a poor orphan when she first makes friends with the lovely Amelia Sedley at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies.

These letters have been selected according to their ability to convey the essential biographical developments of a very interesting life, and their ability to represent highly characteristic verbal and pictorial expressions of a great man of letters.

Set in the years before and after Waterloo, the novel tells the parallel stories of two schoolfriends - the quiet, long-suffering Amelia and her brilliant, scheming friend, Becky Sharp. The novel portrays all the corruption and decadence of 19th-century England.

Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives. Through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world.