Editing Vanity Fair (novel) (section)

=== Emmy Sedley (Amelia) ===
Amelia, called Emmy, is good-natured but passive and naïve. Pretty rather than beautiful, she has a snub nose and round, rosy cheeks. She is well-liked by men, and women when few men are around, as was the case when she was at school. She begins the work as its heroine ("selected for the very reason that she was the best-natured of all")<ref>{{citation |title=Vanity Fair |url=https://archive.org/stream/VanityFair1848 |page=[https://archive.org/stream/VanityFair1848#page/n33/mode/2up 9] |year=1848 }}.</ref> and marries the dashing George Osborne against his father's wishes, but the narrator is soon forced to admit "she wasn't a heroine" after all<ref>{{citation |title=Vanity Fair |url=https://archive.org/stream/VanityFair1848 |page=[https://archive.org/stream/VanityFair1848#page/n137/mode/2up 103] |year=1848 }}.</ref> as she remains soppily devoted to him despite his neglect of her and his flirtation with Becky.

After George dies in the [[Battle of Waterloo]], she brings up little George alone while living with her parents. She is completely dominated by her increasingly peevish mother and her spendthrift father, who, to finance one of his failing investment schemes, sells the annuity Jos had provided. Amelia becomes obsessed with her son and the memory of her husband. She ignores William Dobbin, who courts her for years and treats him shabbily until he leaves. Only when Becky shows her George's letter to her, indicating his unfaithfulness, can Amelia move on. She then marries Dobbin.

In a letter to his close friend [[Jane Octavia Brookfield]] while the book was being written, Thackeray confided that "You know you are only a piece of Amelia, my mother is another half, my poor little wife ''y est pour beaucoup''".<ref name=house/>{{efn|French: "...is the rest."}}{{sfnp|Taylor|2004}} Within the work, her character is compared and connected to [[Iphigenia]],{{sfnp|York|1997|pp=16 ff}} although two of the references extend the allusion to all daughters in all drawing rooms as potential Iphigenias waiting to be sacrificed by their families.{{sfnp|York|1997|pp=20–1}}