This essay is quoted by Margaret Selinger in her Honours thesis about Eloisa James's work, in her discussion of Pleasure for Pleasure and its uses of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:
Mayne [...] decides he must teach Josie how to act and feel desirable. He does so by donning her ballgown and demonstrating a seductive walk. Anne N. Bornschein, a fan of James’s work with a PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a piece on this scene for the Essex Sisters Companion Guide. She points out the rarity of a romance novel hero cross-dressing as a woman, although a heroine cross-dressing as a man is a more common trope (Loc. 556). (168)
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Mayne’s cross-dressing is a part of the play’s “aesthetics of enchantment and transformation” (Bornschein, Loc. 574). Yet at the same time, the scene ultimately returns its characters to the same strictly gendered roles they inhabit in the outside world.
Before putting on the dress, Mayne first removes his own male clothing. Seeing him shirtless, Josie is struck by the change in his appearance.
Now he looked utterly unfamiliar. The sleek, exquisitely groomed Mayne, in the moonlight filtering through those small overhead windows, looked wild, like Bacchus, the god of wine. He would be perfectly at home in a shadowy wood, vines wound in that mop of curls, a sleek mat of hair beginning at his waist (93).
As Bornschein observes, “This last reference again seems to evoke the woodland setting that was home to Puck, Oberon, and Titania in AMND” (Loc. 624). (169)
This essay is quoted by Margaret Selinger in her Honours thesis about Eloisa James's work, in her discussion of Pleasure for Pleasure and its uses of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:
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