Lowell earned a reputation for violating conservative standards by flaunting her obesity, swearing, smoking cigars, and having a same-sex lover, actress Ada Dwyer Russell, with whom Lowell remained all her life. In addition to poetry, she published translations in Six French Poets: Studies in Contemporary Literature (1915), collected critical essays in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) and satire in A Critical Fable (1922), a reprise of Fable for Critics, written by her illustrious New England ancestor, James Russell Lowell. For Fir-Flower Tablets (1921), a detailed collection of miniatures, she joined Florence Ayscough to translate Chinese verse into "chinoiseries," restatements of Asian idiom in English.
During a period when she experienced eye strain and glandular imbalance, Lowell labored on a two-volume centennial biography, John Keats (1925). A substantial contribution to English criticism, the work began as a Yale address and flowered into exhaustive research. Historians blame the rigor of the insightful study for Lowell's sudden death from cerebral hemorrhage on May 12, 1925, in Brookline. She was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Her posthumous volumes include What's O'Clock (1925), which earned a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, East Wind (1926), Ballads for Sale (1927), Poetry and Poets (1930), and Complete Poetical Works (1955).
