Examining Fielding’s sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, this text breaks with critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding’s robust masculinity with Richardson’s feminine sensibilities. Arguing that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding’s writings and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries, this book analyzes Fielding’s major works in connection with a variety of related texts - from satires on the castrati to educational treatises, Whig propaganda, and debates in political theory. Campbell shows how throughout Fielding’s writings, the suspicion that sexual roles are merely assumed - and therefore subject to alteration and appropriation - intimates the possibility that personal identity is always impersonated, incoherent and mutable.