SOURCE: Shaffer, Julie. “Cross-Dressing and the Nature of Gender in Mary Robinson's Walsingham.” In Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture, edited by Chris Mounsey, pp. 136-67. London: Associated University Presses, 2001.

In the following essay, Shaffer considers gender panic, or cultural anxiety over gender boundaries and sexualized bodies, at the end of the eighteenth century, and reads Mary Robinson's novel Walsingham for its depiction of female cross-dressing and gender identity.

By most accounts, the tradition of women dressing as men or presenting themselves as masculine, which had remained strong at least through the mid-eighteenth century in England, waned by the end of the century both in the arts and in reality.¹ While women might earlier be praised for choosing to cross-dress, by the end of the eighteenth century, female cross-dressing became more problematic and it was suggested that women dressing as men had been forced by others or...