SOURCE: Setzer, Sharon. “The Dying Game: Crossdressing in Mary Robinson's Walsingham.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22, no. 3 (2000): 305-28.

In the following essay, Setzer considers notorious eighteenth-century crossdressers, Mary Robinson's own experiences with crossdressing, and the crossdressing plot in her novel Walsingham; or The Pupil of Nature, and reflects on the resulting commentary on contemporary notions of gender.

In her Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), Mary Robinson calls attention to a double standard that designates what is “laudable” in man as “reprehensible, if not preposterous” in woman (71-73).¹ In a footnote citing “living proof of this observation,” Robinson directs attention to the protean career of “Madame D'Eon,” a French diplomat and royal spy as well as the most notorious crossdresser of the age:

When this extraordinary female filled the arduous occupations of a soldier and an embassador, her talents, enterprize, and resolution, procured for her...