Felice Bauer was born in Neustadt in Upper Silesia (today Prudnik), into a Jewish family.

Her father Carl Bauer (c. 1850–1914) was an insurance agent, her mother Anna, née Danziger (1849–1930) was the daughter of a local dyer.

[1] Felice began attending a Handelsschule, a vocational school for commerce, but had to give it up in 1908 because her family could not afford it.

[1] One year later, she moved to the Carl Lindström Company, a manufacturer of gramophones and "Parlographs", then the most advanced dictation machines.

[2] Felice met Franz Kafka in Prague on 13 August 1912, when he visited his friend Max Brod and his wife.

The engagement took place on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, Sunday 31 May 1914, in the presence of Kafka's parents and sister Ottla, but was broken a few weeks later, in August.

Michiko Kakutani notes in a review for The New York Times, "Kafka's Kafkaesque Love Letters" that Kafka's letters have: [the] earmarks of his fiction: the same nervous attention to minute particulars; the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power; the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation – combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardor and delight.

In financial trouble due to an illness, she sold her letters from Kafka to the publisher Salman Schocken in 1955.

[12] In the 2012 world premiere of the stage adaptation Kafka the Musical (written by Murray Gold and produced by Theatre Inconnu, in Victoria B.C.)