makes a "death-in-life renunciation of worldly pleasures"—or the guise of one. Ulrich Knoepflmacher summarised Becky's experience: Love life Amelia Sedley's husband, George Osborne, wants to seduce Sharp: he too fails to see through Sharp's projected image, "blinded by Becky's constructed self". Sharp has sexual adventures, but Thackeray never makes the connection between Sharp's sexual relationships and rise in social status explicit. For Becky Sharp, sexuality and femininity are primarily tools with which to improve her social and financial position in both the short- and long-term. She is unmotivated, says Claudia Nelson, "by either heart or libido". Sharp herself comments, early in the book that "she never had been a girl ... she had been a woman since she was eight years old." Any capacity for love she does possess is narcissistic, and similarly, she puts her financial and social advancement before motherhood. Reception Critical Mid-Victorian literature was still somewhat orientated towards "young ladies' literature" where the readership was morally sensitive. Thackeray took a degree of risk in presenting a character such as Sharp, says Michael Schmidt, but he remained within boundaries, and whilst he was satirical, he broke no taboos. Sharp, then, was a new phenomenon in Victorian fiction, which until Vanity Fair knew only of insipid heroines bound by convention or Smollett-esque grotesques. Amelia herself was one of the former, but Sharp was an original creation. Sharp has been called a "love to hate her and hate to love her" character, and this was radically different from previous representations of young women in literature. Thackeray has been described as "radical" in making his heroine(s) not only female, but also one of them conventionally wicked in character yet sympathetic to the audience. Sharp's way of intruding her life into that of others has led to comparisons by one scholar to other Victorian literary characters. Both Joseph Conrad's Mr Vladmir in The Secret Agent, and in a comic rather than serious setting, Trollope's Mr Slope in Barchester Towers, play similar roles. In a modern sense what made her dangerous to contemporary eyes was her ambition; women did not, in nineteenth-century England, climb the social ladder—at least, not in an obvious manner. That Sharp survives, and at times, thrives, despite her moral ambiguity indicates that Thackeray believed society was no longer able to cure wrongdoing. Sharp was, according to Hughes, "a measure of how debased society had come". Sharp's machinations can only