 Lisa Jadwin has described the book as ending "on a note of malignant irresolution".Sharp's fate is, to some degree ambiguous, and it is possible that Thackeray pastiches the classic Victorian novel's denouement in which the heroine makes a "death-in-life renunciation of worldly pleasures"—or the guise of one.Ulrich Knoepflmacher summarised Becky's experience