In her analysis of Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, Katherine Eggert makes the distinction that the book's shift from fiction to fact is in keeping with its concern of "transformations of kind" and how this shift includes the theme of female and poetic authority.

To begin his discussion of the allegory of The Faerie Queene's Book 5, A. C. Hamilton voices the private opinion of even Spenser's greatest admirers, that "Spencer's fiction seems to break down in Book 5. Probably for this reason the book is the least popular." A few pages later, however, Hamilton slightly revises his assessment of what happens to the poem's fiction in Spenser's Legend of Justice: not that the fiction has broken down, like some neglected machine in the garden, but that the fiction has been suppressed and restricted by Book 5's adherence to a nonfictional point of reference: "Throughout Book 5 the reader...