KAFKA, LOVE AND COURAGE: The Life of Milena Jesenska.<i> By Mary Hockaday</i> .<i> The Overlook Press: 255 pp., $26.95</i>

The test of whether this biography succeeds is whether it overcomes its title. Fortunately, it passes with flying colors. “Kafka, Love and Courage” notwithstanding, this is not a book about Kafka, though its subject, Milena Jesenska, has been called “the one true love affair of [Kafka’s] life.” Moreover, while love (clearly) and courage (as will become clear) do enter into it, they range far beyond Jesenska’s intense but relatively short-lived and largely epistolary relationship with Kafka. In fact, this is very much the book of its subtitle, that is, the life of Milena Jesenska (1896-1944). And a remarkable life it was too.

Until now, the English-speaking reader has had access to that life either through Kafka’s letters (“Letters to Milena”) or through memoirs by her daughter, Jana Cerna (“Kafka’s Milena”) and by her concentration camp friend Margarete Buber-Neumann (“Milena”). This is the first full-scale biography in English or Czech and, tapping the major written sources, published and unpublished, as well as a number of interviews with Jesenska’s intimates, it eloquently and definitively proves that Jesenska does not need to be validated by Kafka (or, because she was a Czech Alma Mahler of sorts, by any of the other gifted men who were her husbands, lovers or confidants).

No, Jesenska’s life deserves to be written and read because it was a life lived to the hilt in a fascinating place and turbulent time--Central Europe (and more particularly, her beloved Prague) during the first half of the 20th century and because Jesenska was both the type and an extraordinary instance of what was then called the “New Woman.”

Mary Hockaday, her biographer and a journalist with the BBC World Service, is deft at evoking both time and place and at placing Jesenska’s life in its social and historical context, but her main concern is with the life itself and the idea of the new woman it exemplifies. She by no means ignores Kafka; after all, Jesenska was among the first to recognize Kafka’s genius, his first translator into Czech (and an excellent one, according to Kafka) and, judging from his letters to her (hers to him are unfortunately lost), his equal in their erotically charged correspondence. (Kafka wrote to her, for example, “Now in the evening as a Goodnight receive the flow of everything I am and have and everything that is blissfully happy to rest in you.”)

But Hockaday soon moves beyond Kafka to chronicle Jesenska’s budding career in journalism. Nominally, she began as a fashion reporter, but she quickly learned to use clothes as a springboard for social issues, approving of a woman’s dress only if, after showing her off to her best advantage, it afforded her the freedom to live independently. (It is no accident that her protest against the conventionally stylish raised hemline coincides with the period of her most radical political stance.)

She was passionate about her loves and hates and expressed them boldly. Her values generally mirror those of the avant-garde intellectuals she consorted with: In both life and art, she admired the simplicity, clean lines and functionalism that characterize, say, the Bauhaus. Yet, unlike them, she gave whatever she wrote a feminist twist.

As the optimistic 1920s darkened into the Depression and the rise of fascism, Jesenska’s articles tackled more overtly political issues, progressing from the battle of the sexes to the battle of the classes and eventually of the nations. For a while she came close to espousing the Communist Party line, but she was honest enough to go back to thinking for herself when eyewitness reports from the Soviet Union made it clear that Stalin was in his own way a match for Hitler.

(The rebellions of Jesenska’s bohemian youth included a certain amount of drug abuse, which returned as a serious problem just as communist rhetoric began making itself felt in her articles. Although Hockaday makes no connection between the two, I would suggest that Jesenska’s attraction to communism came at least in part from the need for pat answers while she was struggling with addiction and that the courage enabling her to kick the morphine habit also helped her to overcome communism’s chimeras.)

In the end, Jesenska paid dearly for both her brief infatuation with the communist worldview and her renunciation of it: Because of the former, she was blacklisted from a number of newspapers; because of the latter, she was ostracized by the doctrinaire inmates at Ravensbruck, the Nazis’ main camp for female political prisoners. Jesenska was sent there in 1940 after a year’s imprisonment for illicit resistance activities (she had help write, publish and distribute an underground periodical, aided illegal refugees and the like), and she died there in 1944 of a kidney infection.

The pieces written in the years immediately before her arrest and the snippets of conversation preserved by her friends from the camp testify to her having developed a positive brand of what is usually thought of as a negative phenomenon: nationalism. Jesenska took pride in being Czech and in the achievements of Czech history and culture yet never denigrated other peoples, not even the Germans, as a means of feeding that pride.

Kafka--to whom one last reference may not be amiss--called Jesenska a “miraculous, violated, inviolable creature.” These qualities came through even in her journalism, where they personalize the more intellectual commentary on the burning issues of the day. One of the strengths of Hockaday’s fine rehabilitation of Jesenska is that she quotes liberally from the articles, but what we need now is a representative anthology. Only then will we be able to appreciate fully this vital and complex personality who has finally, 50 years after her death, come into her own.