(typewriter clacking) (ding) (piano music) - I'm Lucy Jago, and this is A Net for Small Fishes, about a Countess and a doctor's widow whose unlikely friendship spark the greatest scandal of the 17th century.

It's been described as the Thelma and Louise of the Jacobean court.

(piano music) - One of the things that is really remarkable about your book in giving us the female perspective of what was happening in 1615, is that the women's lives are governed by the judgment of others.

And why do you think it's being compared to Thelma and Louise?

(piano music) - You know, they sort of set off this enormous explosion right at the heart of the court, and they involve the king, and his favorites, and all the main ministers in this massive potential murder case.

They really did create an enormous scandal with letters being sent all over in the known world about what they've done, and what does this mean, and it led to a lot of heart searching and so on.

(piano music) Obviously if you're married to someone when you're 13 to someone who's 14, there's a strong likelihood you're gonna grow apart at some point, and it seems like at least a third of the nobles did that, and there was a lot of what they call bed swerving.

So once you'd produced your heir, and ideally a spare, then it was sort of accepted that you might wander off, so I'm trying to add to our knowledge of women in history.

I feel women have been very much painted out.

Women are often, if they're talked about at all in historical books, they're often sidelined or stereotyped, so I suppose this was my effort to try and make some small dent in that.

(piano music) - Thank you, Lucy Jago, for joining us today, and thank you for watching A Word on Words.

For more of my conversation with Lucy Jago, go to awordonwords.org.

I'm Alka Joshi, keep reading.

(piano music) - A Net for Small Fishes is that the King's justice was - caught the little people, the poor, and so on, while the big fish swam away, so the aristocrats get away with things that people who are not aristocrats can't get away with.