Looking with vicious wit at dazzling high-society and criminal low-life, privilege and ambition, this is a classic yet anything but stuffy.
‘Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts…’
Self-serving social climber and anti-heroine Becky Sharp will do anything to raise her status and attain wealth and standing with smart Society. Clever, lively and resourceful, orphan Becky is the the total opposite of her naive and sentimental schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a pampered, yet good-natured girl from a wealthy family. As both women build lives for themselves in London, Thackeray decadently satirises the corruption and flaws of 19th-Century English Society.
