Current Literature--Adah Isaacs Menken, Some Notes of Her Life in Her Own Hand Augustine Daly says in his introductory comments on this brief autobiographical sketch by Menken, "Disjointed as the memoranda are, they give for all that, when her excusable vanity permits, and honest revelation of her own feelings."

In a particularly interesting section of this autobiographical sketch, Menken writes of her "two souls" in a way that resonates with Walt Whitman's own meditation on the difference between the public self and the private self in such poems as "Song of Myself" and "That Shadow, My Likeness." Menken writes, "I have always believed myself to be possessed of two souls, one that lives on the surface of life, pleasing and pleased; the other as deep and as unfathomable as the ocean; a mystery to me and all who know me."

Menken claims in this article to have been born in Bordeaux, France, and to have lived as a child in Cuba before being brought to New Orleans.