Thackeray began his career as a writer of short satirical sketches and parodies but he turned to longer fiction in the 1840s, producing The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon Esq, a picaresque tale of the eponymous narrator's progress in the world, in 1844, and Vanity Fair which was published in monthly parts in 1847 and 1848. The latter novel was his major achievement in fiction, as Thackeray himself recognized. Years later, passing down the street where he had been living when he wrote it, he joked with a friend. 'Down on your knees, you rogue, for here Vanity Fair was penned, and I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself.' That 'little production' is a huge panorama of Regency England that opens in Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies in Chiswick where the two central female characters, Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp, have finished their schooling and are about to depart for Amelia's house in town. The book follows the two friends as they make their way in the world. The kind and gentle Amelia marries George Osborne. Becky, lively, scheming and unscrupulous, marries Rawdon Crawley but is not above an intrigue with her friend's husband and is eventually cast off by her own when Rawdon finds her entertaining the ageing rake Lord Steyne. George dies at the Battle of Waterloo and the pregnant Amelia is left to mourn his death. As the years pass, Becky makes her rackety progress through Regency society while Amelia, still cherishing the memory of George, lives in obscurity with her father and her son. Only when Becky finally reveals the truth about her relationship with George does Amelia turn to her faithful admirer Dobbin who has loved her from afar for many years. Both Becky's and Amelia's contrasting journeys through 'Vanity Fair', Thackeray's term (borrowed from The Pilgrim's Progress) for the worldly society he anatomizes so brilliantly, have reached their conclusions.

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