Ada Russell

Ada Dwyer Russell (1863–1952) was an American stage actress who performed in New York and London and is also known as the longtime companion and muse of poet Amy Lowell. Born in Salt Lake City to James Dwyer, a Mormon bookkeeper, and his wife Sara Ann Hammer, she came of age in a devout household, though she eventually ceased involvement with the Mormon faith. In 1893, at the age of thirty, she married Boston-born actor Harold Russell (1859–1927), and the couple had a daughter, Lorna, the following year. The marriage broke down shortly after Lorna's birth, and while the two entered a lifelong separation, they never formally divorced.

Russell's stage career began in New York in 1891, when she appeared in Alone in London and in Don Juan, playing the role of Doña Julia. Additional New York credits from that period include Mrs. Greenthorne in Husband and Wife and Malka in The Children of the Ghetto (1892). In 1899 she traveled to London to reprise the role of Malka in that production's British debut, where she also worked as a supporting actress alongside Eleanor Robson Belmont. Her Broadway credits include the 1901 musical Sweet Marie. She later toured Australia in 1908 in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, in which she played Mrs. Wiggs. Returning to the United States, she took on the role of Bet in The Dawn of a To-Morrow (1909), Kate Fallon in The Deep Purple (1911), and Grandma in Blackbirds (1912), before retiring from the stage in 1914.

Russell first encountered writer Amy Lowell in 1909 while on an acting tour in Boston, and the two entered an intimate relationship in 1912 when Russell returned to the city for a separate theatrical engagement. By 1914 she had moved into Lowell's home, and their relationship, which Lowell described in the tradition of a "Boston marriage," continued until Lowell's death in 1925. Lowell referred to Russell affectionately as "the lady of the moon" and embraced Russell's daughter and grandchildren as her own. Because the two were compelled to conceal the nature of their relationship, much of their correspondence was destroyed by Russell at Lowell's request, leaving many details of their life together undocumented.

Russell served as the subject of numerous poems by Lowell, including Taxi, Absence, In a Garden, Madonna of the Evening Flowers, Opal, and Aubade. Lowell confirmed to scholar John Livingston Lowes that Russell was the inspiration for her series of romantic poems titled Two Speak Together. Russell declined Lowell's repeated requests to dedicate books to her, relenting only once, for a non-poetry volume in which Lowell inscribed, "To A.D.R., This, and all my books. A.L." Russell's father, James Dwyer, was asked to resign from the Mormon church in 1913 after telling fellow Salt Lake City members that same-sex sexual activity was not a sin.