Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, reflected on the eighth season of Call the Midwife. Tina reviewed A Keeper by Graham Norton. Jean made a good attempt to read collected short stories of Walter de la Mare.

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I read the novel Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray in high school. I thought that I remembered nothing except that it was a large and impressive book.

Recently, I watched the mini-series produced by ITV and Amazon Studios. It aired last fall in Britain and is available for streaming with Amazon Prime.

It turns out that I remembered much more than I thought. The character and place names, especially, were familiar.

Watching this mini-series solved a long-running mystery of my mind.

I started reading historical novels set during the Regency period probably a decade after high school ended. I always wondered why the Battle of Waterloo and the parties that preceded it in Brussels were so familiar to me. Now, I know — I read about them in Vanity Fair in very memorable scenes.

I don’t remember enough to say whether the mini-series is faithful to the book. Critics mostly say that it did pretty well.

Becky Sharp is a wonderfully complicated character. She is selfish, often, but occasionally manages a moment of selflessness. She’s not admirable on all fronts, but she displays a confidence and ambition that modern women still struggle to balance with other aspects of humanity. For myself, I want that confidence, but hope to display it with more compassion than Miss Sharp usually manages.

Have you read or seen Vanity Fair? What did you think?