Becky Sharp

rdf:langString Becky Sharp

rdf:langString Becky Sharp

rdf:langString Becky Sharp

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rdf:langString Several women, including Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Madame du Barry, Mary Anne Clarke and Harriette Wilson

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rdf:langString Illustration by Thackeray to Chapter 4 of Vanity Fair: Becky Sharp is flirting with Mr Joseph Sedley.

rdf:langString Rebecca Sharp

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rdf:langString British

rdf:langString Thackery "highlights the double bind in Victorian England regarding fashionable women's clothing: to be fashionable, one must be aware of the fashions and the ideas they convey, but to be a good Englishwoman, one must pretend to be ignorant of the artificiality of fashion and persuade others of one's ignorance."

rdf:langString Wilde "inquired what became of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after the appearance of Vanity Fair she ran away with the nephew of the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's [Becky Sharp's] style, and entirely by Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling places.

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rdf:langString Ulrich Knoepflmacher

rdf:langString Amy Montz

rdf:langString Rawdon Crawley

rdf:langString Rebecca Crawley is the principal person in the book, with whom nearly all the others are connected: and a very wonderfully drawn picture she is, as a woman scheming for self-advancement, without either heart or principle, yet with a constitutional vivacity and a readiness to please, that saves her from the contempt or disgust she deserves. As a creation or character, we know not where Rebecca can be matched in prose fiction.

rdf:langString All sorts of changes have intervened. Becky has been married and unmarried; she has risen above the Sedley's social scale only to fall beneath Jos again...She has seen King George, been Lord Steyne's friend, lost Rawdon, left her son, gone to Paris, and lived in a Bohemian garret, accosted by two German students.

rdf:langString Becky's reputation inevitably catches up to her in each new setting and circle of aristocratic friends, yet her sense of humour and carefree attitude allow her to proceed with new plans. Becky, in fact, is the only high-spirited character in Vanity Fair, creating her own rules and showing that culture's harsh moral invectives can be frivolous and ineffective when rumours about her character fail to discourage Becky from hatching new schemes to marry gullible men for economic security and respectability.

rdf:langString Rebecca "Becky" Sharp, later describing herself as Rebecca, Lady Crawley, 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 from school. Becky then uses Amelia as a stepping stone to gain social position. Sharp functions as a picara—a picaresque heroine—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 of a young orphan (Sharp) with no source of income who has to make her own way in the world. Thackeray twisted the Victorian tradition, however, and quickly turned her into a young woman who knew what she wanted from life—fine clothes, money and a social position—and knew how to get them. The route was to be by marriage, and the novel follows Sharp's efforts at snaring a wealthy, but simple, husband, and being outdone by fate in her attempt. Eventually, she achieves her aims, but her husband catches her with a member of the aristocracy. Finding herself in Brussels during the Waterloo campaign, as the mistress of a British general, she in no way shares in the alarm felt by other Britons; to the contrary, she soberly makes a contingency plan—should the French win, she would strive to attach herself to one of Napoleon's marshals. It is probable that Thackeray based the Becky Sharp character on real women. A number of historical figures have been proposed, and it is generally considered that Sharp is a composite of them. Sharp has been portrayed on stage and in films and television many times between 1911 and 2018, and has been the subject of much scholarly debate on issues ranging from 19th-century social history, Victorian fashions, female psychology and gendered fiction.