the reader never sees any sign that there is a real Becky beneath the facade of the performer, the flirtatious lover, the good wife, the social climber, the capricious friend". Such women as Sharp, writes Frazee, contributed "nearly as much to the pungent flavour of the period as did the regent himself". Margaret Atwood has praised Sharp as a character, writing how she "makes no pretensions to goodness. She is wicked, she enjoys being wicked, and she does it out of vanity and her own profit, tricking and deluding English society in the process". She compares Sharp to Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country: both live on their wits "and use men as ambulatory bank accounts", although the latter did not have the spirit or sense of humour that Sharp is portrayed with. More personally, suggests Henkle, to Thackeray himself she represented the power of the artist and the writer, in how she overcomes obstacles to achieve her aims. Her entire career, says F. M. Salter, is "one supreme irony", and Patricia Marks suggests that Becky, although a rounded character, remains "nothing without her finery", and compared with her, the other characters appear "tattered". Commentator Heather L. Braun describes Becky at the end of the novel as akin to a Rhine maiden, a Clytemnestra: "she has become 'an apparition' that 'glides' rather than walks into a room; her hair 'floats' around her pale face, framing a 'ghastly expression' that elicits fear and trembling in those who look upon her". Braun compares Becky's wanderings around Europe to the toils of Circe. Popular Thackeray personally disapproved of Sharp's behaviour, and contemporaries would have understood how, from Sharp's actions, she was a bad woman. However, their judgement would be based as much on actual expectations of real social morality as on what they read in Thackeray's pages. More, that they thought she was bad need not have meant they were necessarily unsympathetic. Thackeray himself compared Sharp's career as "resembling the slitherings of a mermaid", and Bloom says that she is enough of a character to make her fundamentally likeable, to the extent that "any reader who does not like Becky is almost certainly not very likeable herself or himself". Poet Dorothy Parker—herself orphaned at age nine—"strongly identified" with Sharp, and effectively treated her as a role model. Meade, in her biography of Parker, says Sharp became Parker's alter ego,