[1] She was born in New York City to Mary Davis and Andrew Jackson Mellen in 1877.

She spent several years as a law reporter in New York while she also studied at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole (1908–1910).

Within a short time, she was writing articles for the Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society, which operated the Aquarium.

But over the years, she continued her own research and writing on a variety of topics, not just fish, and she published both fiction and nonfiction.

She adopted the pseudonyms George Otis and Esmeralda de Mar for some of her work.