Born Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin, Ireland, Ridge was taken by her mother to New Zealand when she was thirteen. After a failed marriage, Ridge herself moved to Sydney, New South Wales, where she enrolled at Trinity College and studied painting at the Académie Julienne. Meanwhile she was writing poems. She arrived in San Francisco in 1907, renaming herself Lola Ridge; the following year she was in New York. In Greenwich Village, her radical sentiments and sympathies for the poor found expression in her poetry. She published in Emma Goldman's radical magazine Mother Earth and issued The Ghetto, and Other Poems in 1918, meanwhile surviving by writing advertising copy, publishing stories, and being employed as a factory worker, artist's model, and illustrator. She began to publish in both well-known and experimental magazines, becoming associate editor of Others and American editor of Broom. New Masses made her a contributing editor in 1926, and the following year she was arrested protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, events which later inspired her Dance of Fire (1935).