| Product Details |
| "Vanity Fair" is a story of two heroines--one humble, the other scheming and social-climbing--who meet in boarding school and embark on markedly different lives. Amid the swirl of London's posh ballrooms and affairs of love and war, their fortunes rise and fall. Through it all, Thackeray lampoons the shallow values of his society, reserving the most pointed barbs for the upper crust. What results is a prescient look at the dogged pursuit of wealth and status--and the need for humility. Reprint. |
|
Key Information
|
| Editors: |
Peter L. Shillingsburg |
| Authors: |
William Makepeace Thackery |
| Fiction Subgenre: |
British |
| Fiction Genre: |
Family & Relationships |
|
Professional Reviews
|
| : |
Athenaeum (London), 19th-century: "In the early numbers of that work he kept the secret at once of his plans--if he had any--and of his power. So poor were the beginnings of the tale that the subsequent numbers ran a great chance of being thrown aside on the faith of the early ones...It was interesting to see how the writer's power grew and accumulated by its own exercise. Number after number of the work seemed to present a new strength drawn out and nourished by the strength of that which preceded. No reader could have pre-pictured the final mastery of hand from the feeble workmanship that laid the first inadequate foundations of that remarkable book." |
|
Book Editions
|
| : |
- Paperback
- 746
- May 01, 2001
- Random House Inc
- 8"(h) x 5"(w) x 1.25"(d), 1.2 lbs.
- 9780375757266
|
|
First Line
|
| Publisher's Note: |
While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. |
|
|
|
