This chapter examines why do people continue to believe that Troilus and Criseyde is the first novel of Geoffrey Chaucer. It focuses on Criseyde because it seems that when people write about this poem as a psychologically realized novel, they are principally thinking of the character of Criseyde. Karl Young mistakenly thought the character analysis of Criseyde was pretty much finalized in 1938. Subsequent generations of critics – and not just feminist critics – would prove him wrong. Chaucer's poem has not generated any modern medievalist novel. Troilus and Criseyde is not a novel, though we comprehend and are sympathetic with the general critical desire to explain Criseyde as if she were a fully realized person; a desire that is sustained by the idea that she is drawn as if she were a character in a realist novel.