Vanity Fair
In Chapter 1,2 of Anne of Windy Poplars, Jen Pringle is described:
My room is full of Pringles and a good many students who bear another name have Pringle blood in them. The ring-leader of them seems to be Jen Pringle, a green-eyed bantling who looks as Becky Sharp must have looked at fourteen. I believe she is deliberately organizing a subtle campaign of insubordination and disrespect, with which I am going to find it hard to cope. She has a knack of making irresistibly comic faces and when I hear a smothered ripple of laughter running over the room behind my back I know perfectly well what has caused it, but so far I haven’t been able to catch her out in it. She has brains, too… the little wretch!… can write compositions that are fourth cousins to literature and is quite brilliant in mathematics… woe is me! There is a certain sparkle in everything she says or does and she has a sense of humorous situations which would be a bond of kinship between us if she hadn’t started out by hating me. As it is, I fear it will be a long time before Jen and I can laugh together over anything.
Becky Sharp is the femme fantale protagonist of Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair.
Vanity Fair
By William Thackeray
The book can be read online at Project Gutenberg
