"She made an unforgettable figure with her gray-blue eyes, her patrician features, her waved black hair, parted in the centre.  Tall and slender, her too large ankles were concealed by the tight hobble-skirts she wore.  Her dresses, of soft dove-coloured shades, or brilliant lemon with magenta  flowers, or pale green and blue, were extremely lovely.  Strange, long earrings dangled from her artificially rosy ears…"
     
Carl Van Vechten from Sacred and Profane Memories (1932)   

Mina Loy was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London, England, December 27, 1882.  She was the first of three daughters of an unlikely couple.  Sigmund Lowy was a Jewish tailor who married Julia Bryan, daughter of conservative British Protestants, when she was seven months pregnant.  The result was a repressed and volatile household.  Mina rebelled early against her mother's Victorian conventionalism. 
Although the Lowys did not believe in formal education for their daughters, Mr. Lowy was an indulgent father and did encourage informal education eventually sending Mina to study art in Munich when she was seventeen.  Upon returning to England she continued her art studies but soon got her parents to agree to allow to her to move to Paris.  It was upon moving to Paris that Mina Lowy, never comfortable with her Jewish heritage, changed her name to Loy, and there, too, around 1900, that Mina met fellow art student, Hugh Oscar William (Stephen)  Haweis.  Haweis

Illustration taken From The Masses: March, 1917

was shorter than average and compensated for his size with planned androgynous modernity.  His "flashing black eyes, olive skin, and glossy dark hair, hanging down like a curtain about his head, gave him the appearance of a young Italian who had stepped from a picture of Raphael." (Becoming Modern, p.67)  Additionally he draped himself in amber beads and scarlet sashes.
Although Mina did not initially like Stephen, circumstances brought them together, leading to a relationship and eventual marriage on December 31, 1903.  Stephen's mother had been an author of columns and books on interior design as well as children's literary adaptations.  Coincidentally, her volume, Chaucer for Children, had been a favorite of Mina's as a child.  Mina was not, however, similarly impressed with Stephen's talents, but his constant references to his frail psyche and his admonitions for her not to leave him bound them together.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
See LOY, page  7