Becky Sharp is the heroine of which novel?
Becky Sharp Becky Sharp Rebecca Sharp is the main protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847–48 novel "Vanity Fair". She is presented as a cynical social climber who uses her charms to fascinate and seduce upper-class men. This is in contrast with the clinging, dependent Amelia Sedley, her friend whom she befriends at school. Becky then uses Amelia as a stepping stone to gain social position. Sharp functions as a "picara"—a picaresque heroine—or by being a social outsider who is able to expose the manners of the upper gentry to ridicule. The book—and Sharp's career—begins in a traditional manner of Victorian fiction, that
Becky Sharp made a strong impression on contemporaries. Elizabeth Browning's protagonist of "Aurora Leigh" (1856), Marian Erle is a similar character to Sharp. In 1872 "The Spectator" reviewed Anthony Trollope's "The Eustace Diamonds" and made an unfavourable comparison between Trollope's main female lead, Lady Eustace, with Becky Sharp. The reviewer wrote how "we had supposed that in Lady Eustace we were to have Mr Trollope's equivalent for Thackeray's 'Becky Sharp’, but we hardly think that we have got it; or if we have, Mr Trollope's equivalent for Thackeray's 'Becky Sharp' is but a poor one." Henry James called Sharp an "epic governess"