John Carey

"I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year," observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest and most appealing women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, a satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century

"An African American who performed in blackface to challenge racial stereotypes; a woman whose song, "I Don't Care," became emblematic of the modern "New Woman"; and a female impersonator whose act was created to uphold the traditional values of American femininity. These stories are at the center of David Hajdu's new work of graphic nonfiction, which recounts the lives and careers of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge, three of the most...