Vanity Fair is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Vanity Fair presents the reader with the question of what kind of behaviour desperation justifies. It also asks whether characters do gain happiness and security (or should gain them) by being selfless and good, or by acting in their own interests. The novel also deals with themes of loyalty. Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives. Through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world.