Never judge a book by its cover. In the photograph adorning Penguin's paperback edition of Vanity Fair, issued as a tie-in with a new BBC serialisation, Natasha Little's Becky Sharp stares out at the camera, smiling coyly. Around her, indistinct crinolines blur into an all-purpose Victoriana. It's a telling image. In Andrew Davies' TV adaptati...more

Never judge a book by its cover. In the photograph adorning Penguin's paperback edition of Vanity Fair, issued as a tie-in with a new BBC serialisation, Natasha Little's Becky Sharp stares out at the camera, smiling coyly. Around her, indistinct crinolines blur into an all-purpose Victoriana. It's a telling image. In Andrew Davies' TV adaptati...more

VANITY FAIR, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmat...more

Among the vibrant cast of characters who scheme and scramble for life's prizes in this entertaining saga, no one is better equipped than Becky Sharp, Thackeray's supreme creation. Brilliant, alluring, and ruthless, she defies her poverty-stricken background to climb the social ladder, while her sentimental companion Amelia longs only for caddish so...more