Delve Readers Seminar: Vanity Fair
Delve Readers Seminar: Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair (“A Novel without a Hero”), by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848), belongs on the same shelf with other towering novels of the Victorian age: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, and The Way We Live Now. Its protagonist, Becky Sharp, is one of the most tantalizing, bewitching, infuriating, charming, scheming, and amoral characters in all of literature, and as we watch Becky negotiate poverty, war, marriage, and scandal, the reader constantly wonders: do I like her? Should I like her? Is she evil, or just practical? And what won’t she do to survive? In this five-week Delve, we will explore Thackeray’s brittle, cynical, and witty masterpiece of social manners, and see how the pressures of class, money, and Empire shape the lives of ordinary people…