Garden of Venus

Lisa Arsenault is a high-school English teacher who is involved in
several ministry campaigns to increase literacy.

This biography does not purport to be accurate. Rather, it is loosely
based on the life of Countess Sophia Potocka, who rose from rags to
riches to reign as the belle of Enlightenment society in the early 18th
century. The narrative alternates between events in the life of the
young, beautiful Sophia as she cuts a triumphant swathe through the
courts of Europe and Sophia’s reflections at the end of her life
before she succumbs to cancer.

If Sophia Potocka was anything like the author’s portrayal, she was
vain, superficial, annoying, not very bright, and almost pathologically
uninterested in the explosion of ideas that was going on around her (it
was, after all, the Enlightenment). Sophia was interested only in being
admired by men and envied by women. And she seems to have lacked even
the usually dependable womanly trait of maternal affection; after the
death of her baby, she’s immediately off to yet another ball.

The Countess Potocka depicted in Garden of Venus is not interesting
enough to warrant a biography.