A Rose for Virtue Author:Norah Lofts Once again one of the most popular authors writing today demonstrated her talent for re-creating history's romantic heroines in this new novel based on the life of Hortense de Beauharnais, stepdaughter of Napoleon Bonaparte. — Hortense was thirteen when her widowed mother, Josephine, married Napoleon, and all the drama, romance, and tragedy which... more » swirled about that amazing and complicated man fills her story. It is a moving tale of human frailty and fate in which Norah Lofts carefully traces the events that brought Hortense to the throne of Holland, and to ultimate disaster: her devotion to her stepfather, her unhappy marriage to his brother Louis, her love affair with one of his officers, and, after Waterloo, her decision to devote the rest of her life to her children, one of whom became Napoleon III. The result is a vivid portrait of Napoleonic France, and of a woman who became a reluctant partner in its glory and an innocent victim of its hatreds and intrigues.« less