Ada Dwyer Russell

Brief biography

Dwyer was born in 1863 to a recently baptized Mormon Salt Lake City bookkeeper James Dwyer and his wife Sara Ann Hammer. In 1893 at the age of thirty she married Boston-born actor Harold Russell (lived 1859–1927), Although no record exists of Dwyer renouncing the Mormon religion she was raised in, she ceased involvement, Dwyer moved in with Lowell in 1914 and their long-term lesbian relationship, or "Boston marriage" (the term for a 19th-century romantic female relationship) would last over a decade until Lowell's death in 1925. Lowell lovingly referred to Dwyer as "the lady of the moon"

Lowell's love poems

Ada Dwyer Russell was the subject of many of Lowell's poems, and Lowell wanted to dedicate her books to Dwyer who refused except for one time in a non-poetry book in which Lowell wrote, "To A.D.R., This, and all my books. A.L." Examples of these love poems to Dwyer include the Taxi, Absence, In a Garden, Madonna of the Evening Flowers, Opal, and Aubade. Lowell's poems about Dwyer have been called the most explicit and elegant lesbian love poetry during the time between the ancient Sappho and poets of the 1970s. In 1899, Dwyer reprised her role as Malka for the show's London debut, where she also acted as a supporting actress alongside Eleanor Robson (Belmont). Dwyer toured Australia as Mrs. Wiggs in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch in 1908 before returning to New York. Back in the United States, she acted as Bet in The Dawn of a To-Morrow (1909), Kate Fallon in The Deep Purple (1911), and Grandma in Blackbirds (1912) before retiring in 1914.