The grave of Ida [sic] Isaacs Menken, poet, actress ... greatest of Mazeppas, is there [Père La Chaise cemetery in Paris].... Her letters to Hattie Tyng Griswold, published after the death of the notorious and unhappy woman, revealed another side of her temperament. Extracts were printed in the newspapers. She was a Mazeppa doubled by a Sappho. Her slender volume of verse entitled “Infelice” was credited to Swinburne, but that is nonsense. The poet of Anactoria, while he sympathized with Lesbian ladies, never wrote bad poetry.... A strikingly handsome woman according to the report of her day, her figure being the “envy of sculptors.” ... A tormented, morbid soul, a virile soul in a feminine body....[5] Upon examination, the volume _Infelicia_ reveals no more obvious lesbianism than do the poems of Brontë or Labé. Its impersonal poems, pleas for the Jews or for industrially exploited women, explain the interest of Dickens and Reade, champions of social reform. The tragic desperation in most of the love lyrics suggests, along with her twice marrying sadistic men and her success as the victimized Mazeppa, a strain of masochism which may account for her appeal for Swinburne (who was not, craving Huneker’s pardon, too sympathetic to lesbian ladies, but who was obsessed by pain). Three poems, however, are obviously addressed to women. “Dying” and “Answer Me” allude to soft and tender hands, warm bosoms. “A Memory; To a Dead Woman” says: Too late we met. The burning brain, The aching heart alone can tell How filled our souls with death and pain When came the last sad word, Farewell![6] In “The Release,” a subjective autobiographical fragment, she says: Wherefore was that poor soul of all the host so wounded? It struggled bravely ... Can it be this captive soul was a changeling, and battled ... in a body not its own?[7] These poems to, or about, women come nearest to serenity and peace of any in the volume. The rest reproach men for their cruelty to the women who bear their children, or, like “Resurgam,” they represent the author as dead though still beautiful, crowned with flowers, and fêted—her spirit murdered by the man she loved.[8]