Dozens of first-person accounts of world-making women appear in print in early modern England. Goddesses, empresses, queens, and consorts tell their own stories, usually at length, and in iambic pentameter. But the worlds constructed in these poems and prose narratives are not recording the thoughts and actions of the narrators; instead, these works are written by men who use female narrators to make, or to make up, history; to express their own political or social concerns; or to sell books to “the gentle gentlewomen readers” who regularly consumed poetry and fiction. Prompted by grammar school exercises in imitation and prosopopoeia, and modeling their texts on Ovid’s Heroides, male writers adopted the voices of famous women, often focusing on the narrator’s relationships with or subordination to men rather than her actions and agency.