Becky Sharp (1935)

In the early nineteenth century, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley are the two graduates in the current class of a girls' boarding school in Britain. While popular Amelia has a promising future, hard Becky, from a poor background, has no prospect at all, that is until Amelia, out of kindness, and her brother Joseph take her in until she can land on her own two feet. Believing her education useless beyond learning the social graces, Becky begins a systematic pursuit of climbing the social ladder, using connections through Amelia, those learned social graces, and the manipulation especially of men by using her flair for the dramatic, this all set against the backdrop of the Battle of Waterloo which involves many of the men in question. While Becky does end up marrying Rawdon Crawley arguably for love, it is her ambition for money and acceptance into the upper echelons of the British social class that may get the better of her.