Notes of Barry Lyndon, Esq., written by himself

Among the brilliant novelists of the Victorian era, William Thackeray occupies the most honorable place and ranks with Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. The novel The Papers of Barry Lyndon (1844), presented in this edition, formed the basis of the famous film by Stanley Kubrick (2004), “one of the most multifaceted and expressive costume dramas in the history of cinema.” Thackeray's novel was published shortly before his famous Vanity Fair, on the pages of which the reader met the charming and incredibly enterprising Rebecca Sharp. The rascal Redmond Barry is her direct literary relative. The story of the adventures of the Irish adventurer, his ups and downs, in which the author plays on the canons of family chronicle and picaresque romance, had mixed reviews from contemporaries, but a few years after its publication the novel was called “a fabulous feat of pure irony” and recognized as the writer’s unconditional achievement. “His gift of genius is submissive to his will, like a servant who is not allowed, succumbing to a violent impulse, to rush to fantastic extremes, he must achieve the goal set for him by both feeling and reason. Thackeray is unique. I cannot say more, I do not wish to say less” (Charlotte Brontë).