Didn't quite finished Anti-Pamela as I skimmed through the last 1/3. I enjoyed Shamela more than Anti-Pamela from an entertainment point of view, but Anti-Pamela is definitely more interesting in terms of what it says about female sexuality. Fielding seems to focus completely on class and what he deems as hypocrisy in the original Pamela. Both parodies are more fun to read, however, than the original. ( )

Two satirical responses to Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, the story of a pure young servant girl and her desperate attempts to guard both her honor and her place against the advances of her rakish master.

The Anti-Pamela, by Eliza Haywood, is a parallel story about another servant girl, Syrena, whose alleged purity is only a sham intended to either entice an aristocrat to marry her or to otherwise provide for her as a mistress or as the result of blackmail. Syrena and her mother work together, and sometimes at odds, to pull the wool over the eyes of Syrena's employers--it's basically the story of a mother-daughter con artist team, and is funny even when one hasn't read Pamela.

Henry Fielding's Shamela is an outright parody of Richardson's book. Fielding's edge is to illustrate the main character's ulterior motives while also taking a stab at Richardson's writing style, etc. This one is shorter, and I enjoyed it a little less than Anti-Pamela.

The Broadview edition (I think it's the only modern edition of Anti-Pamela that's been published yet) also includes some incredibly useful historical notes and explanatory footnotes with regard to the language used. ( )