Thackeray's Vanity Fair opens as two girls are leaving school together: the gentle, innocent Amelia and the sharp-witted, impoverished Becky. Their fortunes are intertwined over the next twenty years, through the Battle of Waterloo and after, in a novel full of lively and perceptively drawn characters.Though regarded as one of the great works of English literature, Vanity Fair is also extremely long and discursive. This abridgement shortens the book to around 60% of the original length, making it more accessible to today's readers. I'm a qualified teacher and librarian who has had seven children's books published in traditional form in the UK and USA. I've also had about sixty short stories published in British and Australian magazines.In 2012 I set up a child-friendly website, www.megamousebooks.com, to offer free children's stories, ebooks and printable puzzles. Five years later I created my second site, www.englishliteratureebooks.com, as a home for free abridged classic novels and classic poetry ebook collections. Keeping both sites going is proving a full-time job, but a very enjoyable one!
