Systemic (a blog mostly concerned with extrasolar planets) has a nice entry which charts how our perception of Venus has changed in recent history.
Venus used to be thought possibly habitable, if extremely humid. Greg of Systemic posts the opening paragraph of Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story The Long Rain, which paints an imagined picture of Venus:
The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.