Free Thinking: Neglected Women: Lady Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Charlotte Robinson.

The work of scientist Margaret Cavendish, poet Lady Mary Wroth, and interior designer Charlotte Robinson are explored in a programme looking at why women are left out of some historical accounts. Tracy Chevalier's novels include stories inspired by fossil hunter Mary Anning, by early settlers of the American west, by women in the lives of painters including Vermeer and William Blake. Tracy Chevalier joins Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Emma Wilkins and Miranda Garrett who'll be sharing their new research with Anne McElvoy on International Women's Day.

Tracy Chevalier is the author of At the Edge of the Orchard about an American pioneer family, Remarkable Creatures inspired by the Victorian fossil hunter Mary Anning and The Lady and the Unicorn - a love story set against the weaving of a set of medieval tapestries which hang in the Museum of Cluny in Paris. Her new book published in May is New Boy, a re-working of Othello set in an American school in the 1970s with a cast of 11 year olds.

Producer: Luke Mulhall.