Chaucer's ‘good women’, and their stories, have troubled readers of the Legend of Good Women. The strange fluctuations in tone between mockery and pathos, the provocative choice of heroine, the sameness of their stories, the boredom which the poet professes for their tragic plights, all have left readers unsure of the response demanded of them. Positivist scholars at the turn of the twentieth century had found the Legend of Good Women one of Chaucer's most interesting poems. But once the question of the relationship of the two Prologues was argued out and the sources of the Legends thoroughly investigated there was for a time little left to say. It was felt that if one ignored Chaucer's many ‘blunders’ and lapses of tone in the Legends one could respond to the ‘genuine pathos’ of the heroines' tragic plights. It was the easy assumption that the Legend of Good Women could be taken at face value, that it combined a ‘fresh’ delight in nature and daisies with a ‘naive’ appreciation of the goodness (and hence, suffering) of ‘noble womanhood’, which led to the belief that the poem was in the end boring, and that Chaucer was as bored as his readers. Indeed the notion of Chaucer's boredom with the Legend of Good Women was a convenient fiction allowing scholars to dismiss a puzzle for which they could provide no adequate interpretative framework.