Napoleon has England on edge. For the cunning and conniving Becky Sharp, it’s an opportunity to take advantage of the chaos and improve her lowly station. Her friend Amelia Sedley, a blue-blood pawn, affords Becky entrée into the moneyed class. As the guileless Amelia pines for a rakish soldier, the ruthless Becky climbs upward, setting the stage for a domestic battlefield of greed, ambition, deception, and dizzying reversals of love and fortune.

Bracingly unsentimental, and featuring the wiliest woman in literature, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a savagely satiric panorama of English society at war.

Revised edition: Previously published as Vanity Fair, this edition of Vanity Fair (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.