Vanity Fair is the story of Becky Sharp, one of the most beautiful, willful, and resourcefully charming pleasure-seekers in literature. With finishing-school credentials and proper connections, Becky begins as a governess, wins the hearts of the moneyed young and old, and, in the light of presentation at court and calculated scandals, emerges a full-fledged courtesan on the Continent, living surprisingly well beyond her means. Thackeray's greatest novel is a moral tapestry of early nineteenth-century English manners, and his persistent theme is the folly of the good-at-heart, the evil of those endowed with grace and wit. Anthony Trollope called Thackeray "...one of the recognized stars of the literary heaven." V.S. Pritchett finds Thackeray "...the first of our novelists to catch life visually and actually as it passes in fragments before us...he is above all a superb impressionist - perhaps our greatest."