Loy was born in Hampstead, London.[1] She was the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish tailor, Sigmund Felix Lowy, who had moved to London to evade persistent antisemitism in Budapest, and a Christian, English mother, Julia Bryan.[2] Loy reflected on their relationship, and the production of her identity, in great detail in her mock-epic Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–1925). The marriage of Lowy and Bryan was fraught. Unknown to Loy, as biographer Carolyn Burke records, her mother married her father under the pressure of disgrace as she was already seven months pregnant with the child that would be Mina; this situation was mirrored later in Loy's life when she rushed into a marriage with Stephen Haweis after becoming pregnant out of wedlock.[3] Lowy and Bryan had three daughters in total, with Mina being the oldest.[4]
As recorded extensively in both her poetry and writing, from Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose to late prose pieces, Loy describes her mother as overbearingly Evangelical Victorian. As Burke records: "Like most Evangelicals, for whom the imagination was a source of sin, Julia distrusted her child's ability to invent."[5] In reference to her mother, Loy recalled that she was troubled by the fact of "the very author of my being, being author of my fear."[6] Loy found it hard to identify with her mother, who not only punished her continually for her "sinfulness," but also espoused fervent support of the British Empire, rampant antisemitism (which included her husband), and nationalistic jingoism.[7]
Loy's formal art education began late in 1897 at St. John's Wood School where she remained for about two years. In retrospect, Loy called it "the worst art school in London" and "a haven of disappointment".[8] Loy's father pushed for her to go to the art school in the hope that it would make her more marriageable.[9] Around this time, Loy became fascinated with both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, and after much convincing was able to persuade her father to purchase her Dante's Complete Works and reproductions of his paintings as well as a red Moroccan leather-bound version of Christina's poems.[10] She also became passionate about the Pre-Raphaelites, starting first with the work of William Morris before then turning to Edward Burne-Jones (her favourite work of which, at the time, was Love Among the Ruins).[10] Loy had to be careful as to how she expressed herself due to her mother's control. For example, Loy described that when her mother found a drawing she had done of the naked Andromeda bound to a rock her mother, scandalised and disgusted, tore up the work and called her daughter "a vicious slut".[11]
