The question of selfhood in Renaissance texts constitutes a scholarly and critical debate of almost unmanageable proportions. The author of this work begins by questioning the strategies with which male writers depict powerful women. Although Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and Milton's Eve figure selfhood very differently and to very different ends, they do have two significant elements in common: mirrors and transformations that diminish the power of the female self.

Rather than arguing that the use of the mirror device reveals a consciously articulated theory of representation, the author suggests that its significance resides in the fact that three authors with three very different views of women's identity and power, writing in three significantly different cultural and historical sets of circumstances, have used the construct of the mirror as a means of problematizing both the power and the identify of their female figures' sense of self.