Literature Network » William Makepeace Thackeray

A tale of two Beckys: 'Vanity Fair' lacks novel's bite

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From: Intelligencer Journal Lancaster, PA
Date: 20050218
Author:Jen Kopf

"Revenge may be wicked," says Becky Sharp in "Vanity Fair," "but it's perfectly natural."

Same goes for jealousy, money-grabbing, snobbery, class consciousness, fear and a whole two-plus hours of unsavory but perfectly natural emotions in this 2004 version of William Makepeace Thackeray's serial novel of 1847-48.

Thackeray's portrait of middle- and upper-class England of the time was well informed by his own life: Born in Calcutta to a father who worked for the East India Company and who died when Thackeray was young; much of an inheritance lost at the gambling tables; the separation of ...

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