A satirical panorama of English society following the amoral schemer Becky Sharp and the gentle Amelia Sedley through the Napoleonic era.
Books mentioned in Vanity Fair (5)
A Thousand and One Nights: “She had a vivid imagination; she had, besides, read the Arabian Nights and Guthrie's Geography”
Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett: “without, however, adding that it was the history of Mr. Humphrey Clinker.”
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “a country where Werther is still read and the Wahlverwandtschaften of Goethe is considered an edifying moral book”
Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “a country where Werther is still read and the Wahlverwandtschaften of Goethe is considered an edifying moral book”
A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson: “in the fly-leaf of a Johnson's Dictionary--the interesting work which she invariably presented to her scholars, on their departure from the Mall.”
Books that mention Vanity Fair (12)
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster: “Tennyson's poems and Vanity Fair and Kipling's Plain Tales”
The Job by Sinclair Lewis: “Una had nibbled at Shakespeare, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Vanity Fair in her high-school days”
The Secret History by Donna Tartt: “"He had been trying to teach me to play piquet ("because it's what Rawdon Crawley plays in Vanity Fair")."”
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: “"I guess you don't like Vanity Fair," Madeleine said”
Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion: “misspelling 'villainous' in a review of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair for the Nutley High School literary magazine”
The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai: “all I had of his was Vanity Fair, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies”
News from Nowhere by William Morris: “I like reading a good old book with plenty of fun in it, like Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair.'”
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie: “the dream flies him at high speed past Barkers department store and the small grey house with double bay windows where Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair”
China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan: “Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, from Kitty's assigned reading list.”
The Common Reader: Second Series by Virginia Woolf: “Listed alongside Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Richard Feverel as novels of the period.”
Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin: “That scene, ending in the death of an old man, carries a shock like the last sentence of the Waterloo chapter in Vanity Fair.”
The Accidental by Ali Smith: “Vanity Fair. A novel without a hero. The Manager of the Performance.”