'I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,' observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest-and most appealing-women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, a wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, char ...