William Makepeace Thackeray 
Vanity Fair 

Vanity Fair is a superb satire of English society in 1848 by William Makespeace Thackeray, which leads the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley among their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It is a story of the two main characters Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, two childhood friends from the opposite ends of the virtuous and mental spectrum. Becky is ambitious, dishonest and smart, Amelia is modest, kind, simple, and not very intelligent. The story is told within a story of a puppet show at a play, highlighting the undependable nature of the events of the story. Place against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. Vanity Fair graphs the girls' problem in love, marriage and family. Amelia marries George Osborne but George, just before he is killed at the Battle of Waterloo, is set to leave his young wife Becky, who has contest her way up through society to marriage with Rawdon Crawley, a young officer from an elegant family. Crawley, disappointed, finally leaves Becky, and in the end virtue apparently succeeds when Amelia marries her constant admirer, Captain William Dobbin, and Becky settles down to proper living and charitable works.