Background
Adah Isaacs Menken was born on June 15, 1835, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Richard and Catherine E. McCord.
Adah Isaacs Menken was born on June 15, 1835, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Richard and Catherine E. McCord.
Menken attended Nacogdoches University.
She appeared on the stage at Shreveport, Louisiana, in The Lady of Lyons as early as 1857 and made her debut in New Orleans the same year in Fazio. She began to publish verse about that time; several poems appeared in the Cincinnati Israelite during 1857–1859 and in the New York Sunday Mercury in 1860–1861.
Menken first appeared on the stage in New York City in March 1859, but it was not until she opened in Albany, New York, in a dramatic adaptation of Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, in June 1861, that she achieved lasting recognition. Appearing in the play’s climactic scene apparently (though not actually) nude and strapped to a running horse, she created a sensation in several cities. Strikingly beautiful, the central figure in a scandalous divorce case, and a talented poet who received encouragement from Walt Whitman, she numbered such literary men as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among her friends and admirers.
Menken’s fame preceded her to London, where she opened in Mazeppa in 1864. Her literary entourage there soon included Charles Dickens, Algernon Swinburne, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1865 she had a run in New York City and the following year another, and she made a successful United States tour before returning to Europe in 1866. Everywhere she played before record audiences. Her performances in such pieces as Dick Turpin, The French Spy, Three Fast Women, and The Child of the Sun were generally respectfully received, but always the demand was for Mazeppa. She performed extensively in Paris and in Vienna, returning to London in 1867. She gave what proved to be her last performance at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in May 1868.
Adah Isaacs Menken died August 10, 1868, in Paris, at the age of 33.
Eight days after her death her Infelicia, a collection of poems that was dedicated to Dickens, was published in London.
Quotations:
"Good women are rarely clever and clever women are rarely good. "
"There is no such thing as unfortunate genius; if a man or woman is fit for work, God appoints the field. "
"There is a graveyard in my poor heart - dark, heaped-up graves, from which no flowers spring. "
Adah Isaacs Menken was described as having a gift for languages.
In February 1855, Adah Isaacs Menken was married for the first time to G. W. Kneass, a musician. The marriage had ended by sometime in 1856, when she met and in 1856 married the man more generally considered her first husband, Alexander Isaac Menken, a musician who was from a prominent Reform Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Her third husband was John C. Heenan, a popular Irish-American prizefighter whom she married in 1859. They had a son, who died soon after birth. Later they divorced as well.
In 1862, she married Robert Henry Newell, a humorist and editor of the Sunday Mercury in New York. They were together about three years.
Next she wed James Paul Barkley, a gambler, in 1866, but soon returned without him to France, where she was performing. There she had their son, whom she named Louis Dudevant Victor Emanuel Barkley. Louis died in infancy.
Richard McCord was an Irish merchant.
Robert Henry Newell was a popular 19th century American humorist.
John Camel Heenan was an American bare-knuckle prize fighter.
