Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair (“A Novel without a Hero”), by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848), belongs on the same shelf with other towering novels of the Victorian age: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, and The Way We Live Now. Its protagonist, Becky Sharp, is one of the most tantalizing, bewitching, infuriating, charming, scheming, and amoral characters in all of literature, and as we watch Becky negotiate poverty, war, marriage, and scandal, the reader constantly wonders: do I like her? Should I like her? Is she evil, or just practical? And what won’t she do to survive?

In this five-week Delve, we will explore Thackeray’s brittle, cynical, and witty masterpiece of social manners, and see how the pressures of class, money, and Empire shape the lives of ordinary people in England during the period of the Napoleonic Wars (although no one would call Rebecca Sharp “ordinary”).

Access Program
We want our classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers class registrations at a reduced rate. The access program for writing classes covers 60% of the class tuition. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.

Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.