Although, like Margaret Fuller, Menken was precocious enough to be translating the _Iliad_ at twelve, she was also dancing in the New Orleans Opera House, and by the age of fourteen “she was a woman, whose sensitive beauty was the pride of the town.” By the time she was twenty she had the following adventures to her credit: marriage at sixteen to “a nobody whose very name has vanished,” who abused and abandoned her; a season of dancing which made her the darling of the Tacón Theatre in Havana; a tour with an amateur theatrical company in Texas, followed by her founding a newspaper in the town of Liberty; being captured by Indians, and rescued by white rangers. A year after the first publication of Walt Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_ she brought out a volume, _Memoirs_ (or _Memories_ [?] now lost) which is said to have “received the placid fervor it deserved.”[3] A few months before she was twenty-one she married a musician in Galveston, Alexander Isaacs Menken, adopted his faith and his name, and retained both to the end of her short but crowded career, though this included several later marriages. She subsequently returned to the stage and toured the south, part of the time in Edwin Booth’s company. In Cincinnati she paused long enough to study sculpture, and became the leading contributor to the _Cincinnati Israelite_. Her article on Baron Rothschild’s admission to parliament won her his epithet of “inspired Deborah of her adopted race.” Moving north to Dayton, she took up military drill and was elected captain in the Life Guards. Here she met a pugilist, John Heenan, known as the Benicia Boy, whom she married a year later in New York, but, like her first unlucky choice, he was brutal, and she subsequently tried matrimony with the humorist known as Orpheus C. Kerr, and again with “one John Barclay.” Menken died, Kerr she divorced, but in what manner she freed herself of her other mates is uncertain. Her success as an actress seems to have been moderate until in New York in 1861 she accepted the part of Mazeppa in a dramatization of Byron’s melodramatic poem. This male part involved being bound to the back of a fiery Arab steed, feet in his mane, head hanging from his crupper, and “she glittered in this role from Albany to London, Paris and Vienna.” In Europe she enjoyed social and literary, as well as dramatic, success. “Nobility and royalty paid court to her; the aristocracy of art thronged to her salon.” She was the intimate friend of Gautier, Dumas, Charles Reade, Swinburne, and Dickens, and in 1868 dedicated to the last of these her second volume of poems, _Infelicia_.[4] Within a few months of its publication she fell ill and died at the age of thirty-three. Menken’s place in the present study is due to James Gibbons Huneker’s comment in _Steeplejack_: