Although few critics deny Thackeray’s position as a major novelist, he has had comparatively little of the kind of critical attention that has been devoted to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, or Henry James in the last thirty years. His curious combinations of satire and sentiment, geniality and deviousness, snobbery and anti-snobbery, and his habits of retreating from one disguise to another, have made him difficult to deal with, and his practice of exposing his stories as fictions has evoked hostility in many critics who are none the less fascinated by him.

In this original and revealing study of the major novels, Juliet McMaster contends that Thackery is a consummate artist and a highly sophisticated ironist, exploiting to the full the potential of the various personae he adopts, and introducing ambiguity deliberately, to sharpen the reader’s moral perceptions and to evoke the complexity of experience itself.

Juliet McMaster is University Professor Emerita in English at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is a long-time literary critic and author of highly readable books on Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope.

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‘a welcome contribution to work on a novelist whose reputation has long been bathed in rather equivocal critical light.’ Queen’s Quarterly

Thackery emerges clearly as a master of subtle irony psychological penetration, technical expertise, and moral responsibility.’ Victorian Studies

‘No serious critic will again be able to dismiss Thackery’s artistry without first countering [Juliet McMaster’s] considerable arguments, and no serious graduate student should be allowed to analyze one of the four novels she discusses without coming to terms with her reading.’ Studies on the Novel