In his preface to the first edition of these letters, Willy Haas described Milena in her youth: She herself sometimes struck one as like a noblewoman of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a character such as Stendhal lifted out of the old Italian chronicles and transplanted into his own novels, the Duchesse de Sanseverina or Mathilde de la Mole: passionate, intrepid, cool and intelligent in their decisions, but reckless in her choice of means when her passion was involved—and during her youth it seems to have been involved almost all the time. As a friend she was inexhaustible,
...more
