[2] Menken told many versions of her origins, including her name, place of birth, ancestry, and religion, and historians have differed in their accounts.

Beginning with work published after moving to New York, with which she changed her style, Menken expressed a wide range of emotions and ideas about women's place in the world.

In her autobiographical "Some Notes of Her Life in Her Own Hand," published in The New York Times in 1868, Menken said she was born in Bordeaux, France, and lived in Cuba as a child before her family settled in New Orleans.

There are many conflicting reports as to Menken's birth name, but she has been called Marie Rachel Adelaide de Vere Spenser and Adah Bertha Theodore, and Ed James, a journalist friend, wrote after her death: "Her real name was Adelaide McCord, and she was born at Milneburg, near New Orleans, on June 15, 1835.

[5] Elsewhere, in 1865, she wrote that her birth name was Dolores Adios Los Fiertes, and that she was the daughter of a French woman from New Orleans and a Spanish-Jewish man.

[6] About 1940, the consensus of scholars was that her parents were Auguste Théodore, a free Black man, and Marie, a mixed-race Creole, and Adah was raised as a Catholic.

[6] Based on Menken's assertions of being a native of New Orleans, Wolf Mankowitz and others have studied Board of Health records for the city.

They have concluded that Ada was born in the city as the legitimate daughter of Auguste Théodore, a free man of color (mixed race) and his wife Magdaleine Jean Louis Janneaux,[4][7] likely also a Louisiana Creole.

The marriage had ended by sometime in 1856,[6] 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.

[11] He began to act as her manager, and Ada Menken performed as an actress in the Midwest and Upper South, also giving literary readings.

She received decent reviews, which noted her "reckless energy," and performed with men who became notable actors: Edwin Booth in Louisville, Kentucky, and James E. Murdoch in Nashville, Tennessee.

[12] The newspaper was founded by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who was crucial to the Reform Judaism movement in the United States.

[11] In 1860, Menken wrote a review titled "Swimming Against the Current," which praised Whitman's new edition of Leaves of Grass, saying he was "centuries ahead of his contemporaries.

[10] He offered her the "breeches role" (that of a man) of the noble Tartar in the hippodrama Mazeppa, based on the poem of that title by Lord Byron[1] (and ultimately on the life of Ivan Mazepa).

[16] The audiences were thrilled with the scene, although the production used a dummy strapped to a horse, which was led away by a handler giving sugar cubes.

In 1862, she married Robert Henry Newell, a humorist and editor of the Sunday Mercury in New York, who had recently published most of her poetry.

[11] Jokes and poems were printed about the controversy, and Punch wrote:[18] Here's half the town - if bills be true - To Astley's nightly thronging, To see the Menken throw aside All to her sex belonging, Stripping off woman's modesty, With woman's outward trappings - A barebacked jade on barebacked steed, In Cartlich's old strappings!

(The last line refers to John Cartlich, equestrian performer [19]) During this time of her greatest earning, she was generous to friends, theatre people in need, and charities.

[20] Playing in a sold-out run of Les pirates de la savane in Paris in 1866, Menken had an affair with the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, père, considered somewhat scandalous as he was more than twice her age.

[10]How long she had been a consumptive no one knew but, from what is known, she was dead at 33 – the flamelike quality that Dickens had called the “world’s delight” extinguished forever.

They buried her in a corner of the little Jewish cemetery in Montparnasse, and on her grave stone are the words, “Thou Knowest,” an epitaph she had chosen from Swinburne, the poet who had said of her, “A woman who has such beautiful legs need not discuss poetry.” She was believed to have died of peritonitis and/or tuberculosis.

Menken wanted to be known as a writer, but her work was overshadowed by her sensational stage career and private and public life.

George Merriam Hyde, one of the most respected critics of his day, refused to critique Menken's work, saying (privately) that "it would be an insult to himself and his profession".

[citation needed] Van Wyck Brooks joked (in public) that "her work is the best example of unintentional wit and accidental humour".

After her marriage and divorce from Heenan and meeting with writers in New York, she changed her style, adopting some influence from Walt Whitman.

Beginning in New York, her poetry expressed a wider range of emotions related to relationships, sexuality, and also about women's struggle to find a place in the world.