The novel delivers the generically required account of the development of the couple's erotic and tender bonds through trials to deep and permanent commitment, while Phyllida's authorship supplies Herendeen's text with a common metafictional feature of postmodern genre romance: a novel-within-the-novel, exploring forbidden sexuality in the fashionable manner of the era.

Passages of Phyllida's fiction are rendered as pastiches of the great Gothic tradition (e.g. Charles Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew "Monk" Lewis, Clara Reeve, Mary Shelley) the language and conventions of which are at once mocked and relished.

According to Herendeen: [Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander] took a traditional Georgette Heyer form of the Regency romance —- a witty, drawing-room comedy of manners -- sexed it up, and queered it by making the hero “slightly bisexual” ....

[4] In her article in the new edition of The Cambridge History of the American Novel, Regis argues: In [Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander], sentimental values domesticate sexual practices and family structures that were (and still are in some cases) against the law.

[11] At the 2011 International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference in NY, Herendeen participated in the panel "The Erotics of Property",[12] delivering a paper entitled "The Upper-Class Bisexual Top as Romantic Hero: (Pre)Dominant In the Social Structure and in the Bedroom."