内容简介
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Introduction by Catherine
Peters A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic
Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray's masterpiece. At
its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in
nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a
charmingly ruthless social climber who is determined to leave
behind her humble origins, no matter the cost. Her more gentle
friend Amelia, by contrast, only cares for Captain George Osborne,
despite his selfishness and her family's disapproval. As both women
move within the flamboyant milieu of Regency England, the political
turmoil of the era is matched by the scheming Becky's sensational
rise--and its unforeseen aftermath. Based in part upon Thackeray's
own love for the wife of a friend, Vanity Fair portrays the
hypocrisy and corruption of high society and the dangers of
unrestrained ambition with epic brilliance and scathing wit.
作者简介
William Makepeace Thackeray, whose satiric novels are often
regarded as the great upper-class counterpart to Dickens's
panoramic depiction of lower-class Victorian society, was born on
July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, India. His father, a prosperous
official of the British East India Company, died four years later,
and at the age of six Thackeray was sent to England to be educated.
After graduating from the Charterhouse School in London, he entered
Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829 but left the following year
without taking a degree. After reading law for a short time at the
Middle Temple he moved to Paris in 1832 to study art. Although he
eventually abandoned the idea of painting as a career, Thackeray
continued to draw throughout his life, illustrating many of his own
works. When financial reversals wiped out his inheritance, he
resettled in London and turned to journalism for a livelihood. By
then he had married Isabella Shawe, a young Irishwoman with whom he
had three daughters.