#72 in Humour
Vanity Fair
- 699
- Pages
- about 13 h
- Reading time
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Our view
Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” remains a broad, funny satire of English society, with no hero and no illusions. It follows two women, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, through the Napoleonic Wars and the years after, sparing neither them nor the people around them. First published as a monthly serial, it runs to nearly seven hundred pages. Some readers find Thackeray’s wordiness tiring.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Vanity Fair is a satirical novel by the English author William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, which reflects both its satirisation of early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text. It was published as a single volume in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero. It is sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.3 across 131 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 47% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Humour average of 7.8. That is how 7.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.7 | 11 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 7.2 | 120 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is Vanity Fair?
It has 699 pages — longer than 99% of the ranked books in Humour.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Humour — with scores between 7.6 and 7.8, closest to this book.
