Adah Isaacs Menken was an American actress and poet who appeared in New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris. She was most remembered for her part as Mazeppa, or the Wild Horse of Tartary, in the play Mazeppa, or the Wild Horse of Tartary. She also published poems in periodicals and newspapers, and a collection of her poems was released shortly after her death.
Menken was born in New Orleans on June 15, 1835, to Auguste Theodore, a free black man, and Magdaleine Jean Louis Janneaux, a French Creole mother. Her later writings and activities show that she got a broad liberal education in literature and languages.
Adah married Nelson Kneass, the first of five husbands, in Galveston, Texas, in 1855. Kneass was a composer and opera impresario from Philadelphia. Despite the lack of a divorce document, she married Alexander Isaac Menken, the son of a prosperous Cincinnati dry goods dealer, in Livingston, Texas in 1856.
She performed as an actor in Louisiana and Texas before moving to Cincinnati with her husband, where she introduced herself to his family as Jewish from birth. She published numerous poems in local Jewish newspapers while in Cincinnati, several of which were later discovered to have been plagiarized from a Jewish poet in Charleston, South Carolina.
Menken moved to New York after securing a divorce in 1859, where she married boxer John Carmel Heenan. When Heenan relocated to London the following year, he abandoned Menken, and Menken’s infant son perished. Menken remained in New York and became a member of the literary circle that included Walt Whitman. She published poems in the Sunday Mercury in 1860 and 1861 before marrying its literary editor, Robert Henry Newell, in 1862.
Menken premiered Mazeppa, a play based on an 1819 Lord Byron poem, at Albany, New York in 1862. The sensational role, which had previously only been played by men, involved her wearing men’s clothes, engaging in a sword fight, being stripped naked, beaten, and tied to a horse that then climbed an on-stage mountain.
Menken and Newell moved to San Francisco in 1863, and she performed Mazeppa throughout California and Nevada, becoming the highest-paid actress of her time and meeting a new circle of literary friends, including Mark Twain.
Menken returned to London in 1864 to reprise his role in Mazeppa. She began hosting literary salons with famous authors such as Charles Dickens. She married Capt. James Barkley, a gambler and businessman, in 1866, and the couple moved to Paris. Menken had a son, who died in the summer of 1867. In Paris, Menken became a stage celebrity again, socializing with writers George Sand and Alexander Dumas, with whom he had romantic relationships.
Menken became unwell in May 1868 while working on a poetry collection. She died at the age of 33 on August 18, 1868. She was buried in the Jewish part of a Paris cemetery after her death. Infelicia, a book of poems devoted to Charles Dickens, was published the next week. It was still in print until 1902. Her poems covered a wide range of topics, from spirituality to love, despair, social conventions, and women’s roles.