In 1900 Loy attended the Munich Künstlerinnenverein, or the Society of Female Artists' School, which was connected with the fine art school of Munich University, it was there that she claimed she learned draughtsmanship.[12]
Upon returning to the stifling environment of her family home in London, after the relative freedom she found in Munich, Loy suffered from "headaches, respiratory problems, and generalized weakness" which was then diagnosed as neurasthenia – "a catch-all term for a variety of psychosomatic complaints suffered by artistic or intellectual women and a few sensitive men" during that time period.[13]
Around the age of eighteen, Loy convinced her parents to allow her to continue her education in Paris with a chaperone – a woman called Mrs. Knight.[14] After much persuasion, she was allowed to move to Montparnasse, which in 1902 had not yet been urbanised, and attend the Académie Colarossi as an art student.[15] Unlike the segregated classes at the Munich Künstlerinnenverein, these art classes were mixed. It was here, through an English friend of a similar social standing named Madeline Boles, that Loy first came into contact with the English painter Stephen Haweis who Loy later described as enacting the "parasitic drawing-out of one's vitality to recharge, as it were, his own deficient battery of life."[16] According to Burke's biography, Haweis was unpopular with his fellow students, being considered a "poseur," and Boles in particular took him under her wing.[16] Haweis, whose father was the well-known Reverend H.R. Haweis and his mother Mary Eliza Haweis a writer who wrote, amongst other things, Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key, was an aesthete of sorts and "despite being very short[,] he managed to condescend to his listeners from a height."[16] He began to exert himself over Loy, recognising her beauty and desirability, and played the role of the misunderstood eccentric which led Loy to feel guilty for disliking him and distrusting him as he borrowed more and more money from her without paying her back. Later she would reflect that Haweis loomed over her and she became, in Loy's own words, "as sullenly involved as with my mother's sadistic hysterics."[17] One night he convinced her to stay over and, in what she would later describe as a state of hypnosis, she was seduced by him. Waking up next morning in his bed, semi-naked, Loy was horrified and repulsed.
A few months after this, she realised that she was pregnant, something which terrified her as it bound her, as she later described, even closer to "the being on earth whom she would have least chosen."[18] Being only twenty-one, she faced a difficult situation and, fearing rejection from her family and disinheritance, which would leave her penniless, she sought her parents' approval to marry Haweis, which they agreed to due to his respectable social status as the son of a preacher. Reflecting on this in later life, and how her upbringing influenced her in the decisions she made, Loy remarked that "If anyone I disliked insisted upon my doing anything I was averse to I would automatically comply, so systematically had they obfuscated my instinct of self-preservation."[19]
