abstract:The Luck of Barry Lyndon is a picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in serial form in 1844, about a member of the Irish gentry trying to become a member of the English aristocracy. Thackeray, who based the novel on the life and exploits of the Anglo-Irish rake and fortune-hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney, later reissued it under the title The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq..
Coming on the heels ofTheLuckofBarryLyndon (1844), in which a financially strapped and roguish outsider tries vainly to find a place in English society, Vanity Fair paints on a much broader canvass and finds the ultimate social climber in the talented, lovely and ever-conniving Becky Sharp.