Ada Dwyer Russell was a Broadway and London stage actress raised in a Mormon pioneer family in Salt Lake City — and later, the longtime partner of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Amy Lowell, the addressee of some of the most explicit lesbian love poetry published in America before the 1970s. This episode traces Russell's journey from the Salt Lake Theater to the Boston literary world, her father's own startling collision with LDS Church discipline over his views on homosexuality, and the unresolved question at the heart of her story: was she Lowell's equal partner, or a woman whose voice was folded into, and largely erased by, her more famous lover's legend?

References:

• Bellot, Gabrielle. "Lady of the Moon." Poetry Foundation, 3 June 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150142/lady-of-the-moon. Accessed 7 Sept. 2026.
• Bradshaw, Melissa, and Adrienne Munich, editors. Amy Lowell, American Modern. Rutgers University Press, 2004.
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• Parker, Sarah. The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930. Routledge, 2015.
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• Rollyson, Carl. Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography. Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.
• "Ada Dwyer Russell." Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Dwyer_Russell. Accessed 7 Sept. 2026.
• "Today In Mormon History: 100 Years Ago Today – May 9, 1913." On This Day in Mormon History, todaysinmormonhistory.blogspot.com, reposted at www.todayinmormonhistory.com/2013/05/100-years-ago-today-may-9-1913.html. Accessed 7 Sept. 2026.

Image credit: Stage actress Ada Dwyer (SAYRE 22875) [Photograph]. (n.d.). Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stage_actress_Ada_Dwyer_(SAYRE_22875).jpg