A Reason to Read: Vanity Fair

In Quebec this summer I would walk miles from where I was staying into town to buy books every few days, and, as English is not the primary language there and I was out in the country, classics were more or less all I could find. And what a good thing that was! I read Vanity Fair for the first time and walked around in a daze for days wondering how people can be so cruel and how one person could be so funny. Thackeray's masterpiece is an exquisite novel, posited jarringly "without a hero," that cleaves a stark line between the old and new in modern storytelling. My favorite line is this one:  A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES. The full passage can be found here.

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[Janice]

"I too could be a good woman, if I had three hundred pounds a year."