Enchantress of Nations is a lavish biography of Pauline Viardot, whose life spanned most of the nineteenth century; and it also weaves a rich tapestry of music and literature in France, England and Russia. We meet George Sand, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; Rossini, Berlioz, Chopin, and Charles Gounod, with whom Viardot had a stormy friendship; and especially the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, with whom she had a passionate40-year affair.