Who is Becky Sharp in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair?

In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is the novel’s central character and a quintessential literary adventuress. The daughter of a poor drawing master, she is portrayed as an ambitious, energetic, and essentially amoral figure who schemes her way up through the ranks of early 19th-century English society.123

As the primary foil to the wellborn and passive Amelia Sedley, Becky is the pivot around whom the other characters revolve. Her journey includes a marriage to Rawdon Crawley, a young officer from an aristocratic family, though she remains a provocative and complex figure throughout the narrative. Thackeray presents her with dispassionate sympathy, using her character to explore the vanities and human frailties of the Regency period. Ultimately, the novel concludes with Becky settling into a life of genteel living and charitable works.231