We’re all Becky Sharp at heart: Vanity Fair lives on

 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1847/8)

Becky by Sarah May (2023)

Letter of Intent by Ursula Curtiss (1971)

 

Yesterday I was looking at Ursula Curtiss’s forgotten gem, Letter of Intent, and it struck me that her heroine, Celia, was a Becky Sharp of the 1960s/70s. And is heroine the right word? 

William Makepeace Thackeray’s original book of Vanity Fair is subtitled ‘A Novel without a Hero’ – and it is left to the reader to decide whether this is a matter of gender or of less than heroic properties.

Either way, Becky Sharp is one of the most memorable characters in Victorian literature – and it is all the more impressive that she was created by a man. And one, at that, who complained that he was not allowed to write about sex in his books.

This is from a long-ago piece I wrote for the Guardian:

"No writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN." This is William Thackeray introducing his book Pendennis. Perhaps surprisingly, it is clear he means something very specific: he thought that "society will not tolerate" an accurate depiction of a young man's sex life. He made the complaint several times: that he was constrained by convention from being honest about what he saw as a huge and vital part of life. It seems clear that if Thackeray had had the chance, he would have included sex scenes in his book – rueful, good-natured, nonjudgmental ones, surely.

And then up popped a new book by Sarah May: it’s called Becky, and is very much based on Vanity Fair. I absolutely loved it, it is enormously clever, witty and enthralling. ‘She’s on her way to the top, one scandal at a time.’ Author Sarah May does something incredibly outrageous – not really a 

SPOILER

 you will see this in any publicity:

 

She turns her Becky into a (very much fictional) version of Rebekah Brooks, the queen of the tabloids in the 90s, and the subject of many a scandal herself. The names are all new, and the details are different, but the story tells of a media dynasty with a rich ruthless man at the helm. His own family are not all that, but he loves the way Becky operates, she is a woman after his own heart. Tabloid methods, phone-hacking, murders and the treatment of women all feature. It is an absolute tour de force, and of course we must remember this from the copyright page:

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and artistic licence reigns supreme.

[there is an absolutely terrible book by lost author Ethel Mannin, Proud Heaven, of which the only bit I enjoyed was the message on the opening page: ‘Persons attempting to identify themselves with any of the characters will be sued for libelling the author’s creative capacity’]

What defines these Beckys is that they have a deep mistrust of the world, and think they  need to look out for themselves, and they have  a point. Unearned privilege and entitlement are all around, stopping them from getting on, fair enough that they fight back, though we can’t approve of everything… and that’s the story of all the Becky Sharps in fiction.

I always enjoy them – there’ve been a few on the blog:

• Therese Desqueyroux by Francois Mauriac (clothesinbooks.blogspot.com) was a highly enjoyable story.

• Blogfriend Sarra Manning did  a marvellous updating of Vanity Fair, The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp: Vanity Fair – Ancient and Modern (clothesinbooks.blogspot.com)

• In a Guardian piece on toxic dinner parties, I wrote about the original Becky Sharp having her first encounter with chilies   In bad taste: Awful dinner parties in fiction | Fiction | The Guardian

I think there are more Becky Sharp’s out there for us all to enjoy – recommendations anyone? Put them in the comments.

 

For the clothes for the modern-day Becky in Sarah May’s book I went straight to one of my most-loved recent finds – the Old Ralph Lauren Adverts tumbler (see this post for more on this). The book is set between 1989 and 2012, so prime Ralph years.