The recent publication of the first modem edition of Eliza Haywood`s Anti-Pamela is worthy of full critical attention, in that Anti-Pamela is Haywood`s response to Samuel Richardson`s "overwriting" of amatory fiction, her very specialty genre, and `sentimentalizing` of femininity with Pamela, and thus provides a third text that can revamp the Pamela controversy between Pamela and Shamela. Ever since its inception at the heel of Pamela`s immediate success, the said controversy has revolved on the (in)authenticity of Pamela`s virtue and its self-representation. What informed this controversy was the then emerging `myth of femininity,` a myth that Pamela helped create, based on the binary opposition of female `sentiment` and `sexuality` and a thorough quarantine of the former from the latter. In this respect, Pamela and Shamela are not antithetical but complementary intertexts to complete the myth, representing the sentimental novel and burlesque satire, the two equally male-centered representational modes of sentimental femininity and female sexuality respectively. Anti-Pamela offers a corrective to the hitherto misinformed controversy by showing that neither femininity nor its (self-)representation can be transparent, given the opaque and duplicitous conditions in which women like Syrena Tricksy, Haywood`s anti-Pamela, are forced to live, precisely because of the myth of femininity.