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Milena Jesenska is best known as the recipient of Kafka's Letters to Milena. This compelling biography fleshes out Kafka's muse, a radical-thinking, thoroughly independent woman and journalist in her own right who lived at the center of cosmopolitan Prague before the war. Always a breaker of conventions, she advocated free love, simple fashions and female independence. She experimented with Bohemianism, cafe society, sex and drugs, had passionate friendships with other women and shoplifted occasionally. She also translated Gorky, Stendahl, Flaubert, Stevenson - and Kafka. The two met when Milena approached Kafka, asking for permission to translate his work, and the two were soon engaged in a deeply intimate correspondence. As a journalist, Milena left a vivid record of the times, writing on diverse subjects, from the latest fashions, modern architecture and interior design to contemporary politics and, in time, the Munich crisis and Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the Second World War broke out, she was part of the underground resistance until her arrest and detention in Ravensbruck concentration camp. Drawing on unpublished letters and other archival material from Prague and on Milena's own journalism, Mary Hockaday casts Milena's life against the backdrop of the intellectual circles of pre-war Prague. Milena emerges as a real woman who lived both heroically and imperfectly in complex times, a fascinating woman of enormous vitality and passion.

Born and raised in Prague, Milena Jesenska (1896-1944) married young and moved to Vienna, where, homesick, she began her career as a journalist writing columns for a Czech newspaper. Her writings show a woman of complex sensibilities?she wrote as passionately about fashion as she did about politics (her own leanings were Communist). During the early 1920s, she began translating some of Kafka's work into Czech and struck up an intimate correspondence with him that lasted on and off until his death in 1924. Hockaday (BBC World Service) weaves a compelling narrative from the drama of Jesenska's short life: in 1939, with Germany's annexation of Czechoslovakia, Jesenska turned her full attention to the plight of refugees; she died at the age of 47 in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. For another take on Jesenska, see Milena, Margarete Buber-Neumann's memoir of their friendship (LJ 4/15/88). Highly recommended.?Diane G. Premo, Rochester P.L., N.Y. Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information.

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"Milena," observed a friend at a Prague cafe in the 1920s, "looks as careworn as six volumes of Dostoevsky." It was not easy to live intensely and freely amid the economic and political anxieties of the interwar years. Although Franz Kafka's letters to her (her own half of this fervid correspondence being lost) have given her a footnote in literature, and her publisher a misleading if market-targeted title for this biography, its interest is more in the evocation of bohemian, intellectual central Europe, particularly Vienna and Prague, from the close of the first World War into the second. Even hampered by drug addiction and occasional kleptomania, Jesenská eked out a freelance career writing about feminism, fashion, urban style and family life. Almost never earning enough for real independence, she depended on a supplement reluctantly supplied by her father (a Czech dental surgeon)and on her two husbands and several lovers. Jesenská first came to know Kafka through translating his German she died at 47 she also translated Stevenson, Stendhal, Flaubert, Gorky and Poe. The hopeful years, however straitened, ended with the West's sellout of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. When the Germans occupied Prague, she contributed defiantly to the underground press until her arrest in November 1939. Jesenská died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944, 51 years before she would be honored at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as a "righteous gentile" for her efforts in saving Jews from the Nazis. A BBC World Service journalist with Prague credentials, Hockaday writes simply and poignantly about an unconventional minor heroine of her time, often letting Jesenská speak through her own writings. Illustrations. (Mar.) Copyright 1998 Publishers Weekly Reviews