There's a practice in women's history publishing that used to drive me up the wall – writing about women but centring the more famous men in their lives. The "wife of" biographies. Titles like Shakespeare's Sisters, Hardy Women or Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life would send me on a rant. Were these women worth writing about on their own? If so, why not give them centre stage? If not, why were we using them as props to angle yet another biography of the guy in their life?

I have mellowed.

I can't blame either authors or publishers for grabbing onto whatever recognisable name will get audiences to notice a book. Most people don't read. Those who do may buy one or two books a year. The odds of that book being a nonfiction hardback about a woman no one's ever heard of are astronomically low. You do whatever helps.

More than that, historians have to examine the lives women led, not the ones we wish they had. In many eras and cultures – and that's certainly the case in 1776 America – married women's primary identity was indeed "wife of". It was the defining, organising principle of their lives. An honest history cannot ignore it. The best of these books find the woman behind the wife.

Fact is, as my guest this week, Amanda Vaill, told me, we probably wouldn't care much about the Schuyler sisters – the two eldest of a slew of blue-blooded Dutch children in the 18th-century Hudson Valley – if it hadn't been for their connection to Alexander Hamilton. Their influence on the man who influenced the shape of a new nation is what makes them historically significant. The bizarre love triangle they formed with their husband and brother-in-law is what makes their story compelling. Might as well embrace it.

Or maybe that's all just my excuse for the fact that this week's episode utterly fails the Bechdel test. We are two intelligent women – Amanda Vaill especially, she just won the Pulitzer Prize for biography with this book – talking about two intelligent women – Eliza Schuyler Hamilton (1757-1854) and Angelica Schuyler Church (1756-1814) – and mostly we are talking about the soap opera that was their love life. If you like history and you like a Bravo show, this one's for you.

Tl;dl (too long; didn't listen)

Here are a few things I learned:

• Angelica never introduced Eliza to Hamilton, nor did she step aside for her baby sister (sorry, Lin-Manuel lied). Angelica probably only met Hamilton at the wedding, if then. It's true that sparks flew right away.
• Angelica was actually already three years married by then. And boy is that another soap opera! She was married to John Carter, a dashing young man whom the Continental Congress had sent into her general father's home to audit the books and make sure money was spent efficiently. The OG DOGE guy, as Amanda Vaill puts it. Had they known... Angelica was Mrs Carter for YEARS until her husband, who made a fortune profiteering from public contracts during the Revolutionary war, moved them to Europe, paid off his debts and revealed his true identity! He was John Barker Church, a man once so bankrupt he had taken off to America under an assumed name. His entire family thought him dead. The record doesn't say how Angelica took it, but I hope someone spent a few nights on the couch.
• Did they? Didn't they? I think Amanda Vaill as much as says Angelica and Hamilton had a physical affair, but she won't cop to it. We'll never know for sure.
• Either way, the emotional cheating was real. "I love your husband very much, and if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would LEND HIM TO ME FOR A LITTLE WHILE," Angelica once wrote to Eliza. I don't have a sister, but I'm pretty sure that's not how things work.
• Thomas Jefferson entered the chat. He was a sad widower but also an incorrigible flirt who was having an affair with Angelica's best friend and immediately dropped her when he met Angelica in Paris. She liked to charm but she had her limits. She demured when he suggested they share a cabin on the boat back to New York (we have receipts of this).
• Angelica seems to have also been disturbed by Jefferson's behaviour around his then 14-year-old Sally Hemings, the enslaved companion but also aunt of his daughter. (Sally was half-sister to Jefferson's late wife.) This is around the time their relationship started and Sally would famously go on to carry several of Jefferson's children.
• Angelica's flirtation with Jefferson may be another reason for his feud with Hamilton. Sure, one was a Republican, the other a Federalist, but also, they were after the same girl.
• Vaill argues Eliza had much more of an intellectual collaboration with Hamilton than previously acknowledged. She spots her influence by the very distinctive spelling mistakes she makes in her private letters – mistakes you find again in Hamilton's speeches and essays. My favourite scene is when Eliza sends Angelica a copy of the Federalist papers and signs her name next to her husband's on the title page. Take that!
• Eliza had a sincere friendship with the Marquis de Lafayette, especially in old age when they were the last two survivors of a long-gone generation. Read the book for the moving scene of their last meeting.

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Now on Youtube

The episode's on Youtube, if that's your preferred channel. The page there has fallen behind but I'm uploading the American Revolution episodes as we speak. Editing for audio and video are two very different exercises and I prioritise audio. Sorry if the image skips a lot.