SOURCE: "From Sir Thomas Malory to Sir Francis Bacon," in Motives In English Fiction, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1918, pp. 1–51.

In the following excerpt, Whiteford examines several of Greene's euphuistic novels and finds an increasing emphasis on autobiographical elements from one to the next.

… When in her chamber Mamillia, debating as to whether she will be true to her father or to her lover Pharicles, soliloquizes, "no misling mists of misery, no drenching showers of disasterous fortune, nor terrible tempests of adversity shall abate my love or wrack my fancy against the slippery rocks of inconstancy: yea if my lands will buy his ransom or my life purchase his freedom, he shall no longer lead his life in calamity," we are at once aware that Robert Greene, a graduate of Cambridge, has begun to write fiction in 1583 in the style of John Lyly. The most noteworthy euphuistic novels of...