Becky Sharp is sly, cunning and will do anything for money and power, while her friend Amelia Sedley is good-natured but naïve. In this scandalous tale of murder, wealth and social climbing, the two women's fortunes cross as they search for love and success across nineteenth-century Europe in the Napoleonic Wars. While Vanity Fair was criticized on publication as being a cynical view of mankind, Thackeray's epic adventure is a searing portrayal of men and women at their most vulnerable.