Butterfly Games follows Swedish countess Jacquette Gyldenstolpe as she navigates the glittering yet treacherous royal court of 1800s Europe, where one misstep in love or politics could mean ruin. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Like so many of the interesting paths I’ve taken in my life, Butterfly Games began with a book. As a teenager, I loved Annemarie Selinko’s Désirée, about the French silk merchant’s daughter who was once engaged to Napoleon and later became Queen of Sweden. Years later, I began researching her descendants, the Bernadotte dynasty, and discovered Jacquette Gyldenstolpe.

Jacquette immediately fascinated me. She was a young Swedish countess whose life became entangled with Désirée’s son, Prince Oscar, soon after his family arrived from France and became Swedish royalty. Sweden was in an extraordinary moment of transition: it had lost Finland in a war with Russia, deposed a king, and imported Oscar’s father, a French commoner, to establish a new dynasty. Into that political uncertainty came two young people, Jacquette and Oscar, who were outsiders in very different ways.

The more I researched Jacquette—her childhood at Finspång Castle, her parents’ scandalous divorce, the letters she and her family left behind—the more I knew I had to write this novel.

The concept of the “Butterfly Game” as a social code is fascinating. Is it based on historical practice or your own invention?

A little of both. The phrase itself has a historical origin, but the larger meaning it takes on in the novel is mine.

While translating material connected with Queen Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta’s extensive diaries, I came across the Swedish word fjärilsleken—literally, “the butterfly game”—in an annotation describing the queen’s husband’s philandering with women at court. Titles are hard, but this one—Butterfly Games—locked in the first time I translated the term.

In the novel, I expanded the meaning of the Butterfly Game into shorthand for the unwritten rules governing court life: who could marry whom, who had access to power, who possessed useful information, and how sex, gossip, friendship, family connections, and political alliances could all become currency. Women could not command armies or hold political office, but they could form alliances, circulate information, influence powerful men, and occasionally bend the system to their advantage.

So, there was no historical rulebook called “The Butterfly Game.” The phrase is, however, a real historical term; the social and political game Jacquette struggles to understand is my fictional interpretation of the world she faced.

Jacquette is a compelling heroine. Did any historical figures influence her creation?

Jacquette Gyldenstolpe is a historical figure, which is part of what made writing her so irresistible. History (largely written by men) had reduced her largely to a stereotype: the Swedish countess who had an affair with Prince Oscar. I wanted to know who she was before she became the prince’s favorite.

Researching the true story of Jacquette’s life took years. I eventually discovered hundreds of letters written by her and members of her family, many of them in French, along with memoirs, court records, newspapers, and later a wonderful Swedish-language biography. Those sources gave me the framework of her life, but inevitably there were gaps. No archive has documentation about what she and Oscar said when they were alone or how she felt at the most consequential moments of her life. As a historical novelist, that’s where my fun began.

The women around Jacquette also helped me understand the choices available to her. Her mother, Aurora, was pragmatic and politically astute; her Aunt Emilie had survived scandal of her own; Queen Charlotte understood the uses of court influence remarkably well. They lived in a society that placed severe limits on women, yet they still found ways to exercise power. I wanted Jacquette to belong to that world rather than giving her twenty-first-century attitudes. Her rebellion had to be the rebellion of a young woman born in 1797.

Can we expect a sequel or continuation of Jacquette’s story in future works?

Yes. And I should be in my writing space drafting Book Two of the Butterfly Games series right now. When the first book closes, Jacquette and Oscar’s story is very much unfinished.

Book Two begins after the events of Butterfly Games, with Jacquette no longer the bullied teenager readers first met. She is a married woman who understands far more about the world she inhabits—and about the cost of playing, or refusing to play, the Butterfly Game. Oscar is now crown prince, first in line to the throne, so the choices they made when they were younger carry much greater consequences.

And then there is Carl Löwenhielm. He can offer Jacquette something Oscar cannot: a socially acceptable future. I’m fascinated by love triangles in which the choice is about more than two men, because each relationship represents a different possible life. Book Two increasingly asks a third question beyond Team Oscar or Team Carl: what would it mean to be Team Jacquette?

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