[1] She was the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish tailor, Sigmund Felix Löwy, who had moved to London to evade persistent antisemitism in Budapest, and an English Protestant mother, Julia Bryan.

"[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.

[12] Upon returning from the relative freedom she found in Munich to the stifling environment of her family home in London, 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.

"[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.

[25] The opening details: I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape [...][25] Whilst Loy was in labour through the night, Haweis was absent with his mistress.

He is running upstairs[25] Two days after her first birthday, Oda died of meningitis and Loy was left completely bereft with grief over the loss.

[28]After this positive reception Loy was asked to become a sociétaire of the drawing category, which meant that her work could be exhibited without having to pass through a selection committee.

During this period of separation Loy was treated by a French doctor named Henry Joël le Savoureux for neurasthenia, which had worsened with the death of Oda and living with Haweis, and the pair embarked on an affair which would end with her becoming pregnant.

This was one of her earliest, critical encounters with Christian Science as she sought out a practitioner, who prescribed a treatment and told Loy to feed Joella beef broth and donkey's milk.

Once the children were toddlers, Loy spent increasingly less time with them and they were often cared for in the cooler climate of the mountains and Forte de Marmi in the summers.

[33] Gertrude would later recall that Loy, as well as Haweis, were amongst the few at that time who expressed serious interest in her work (she had not yet been widely recognised for her literary achievement).

In daughter Joella (née Sinara) Bayer's memoir, now part of the Mina Loy Estate, she reflected on her parents, saying: My mother, tall, willowy, extraordinarily beautiful, very talented, undisciplined, a free spirit, with the beginning of too strong an ego; my father, short, dark, a mediocre painter, bad tempered, with charming social manners and endless conversation about the importance of his family.

[35]According to Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers:During their ten years in Florence, both Mina and Haweis took lovers and developed their separate lives.

In 1913 and 1914, though she was coping with motherhood, a soured marriage, lovers, and her own artistic aspirations, Mina found time to notice and take part in the emerging Italian Futurist movement, led by Filippo Marinetti, whom Loy had a brief affair with, and to read Stein's manuscript: The Making of Americans.

[22]In winter 1913, at Caffe Giubbe Rosse (an informal meeting place of those involved in Giovanni Papini's Lacerba) Loy's lodger friend and fellow artist, the American Frances Simpson Stevens, met Florentine artists Carlo Carrà and Ardengo Soffici, who, with Papini, had joined forces with Marinetti's Futurists earlier that year.

Disillusioned with the macho and destructive elements in Futurism, as well as craving independence and participation in a modernist art community, Loy left her children, and moved to New York in winter 1916.

Within days of being in New York Stevens took Loy to an evening gathering at Walter and Louise Arensberg's 33 West Sixty-seventh Street duplex apartment.

As Loy's biographer Carolyn Burke describes: 'On any given evening the Arensbergs’ guests might include Duchamp’s friends from Paris: the painters Albert Gleizes; his wife, Juliette Roche; Jean and Yvonne Crotti; and Francis Picabia, as well as his wife, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia; the composer Edgard Varèse; and the novelist and diplomat Henri-Pierre Roché.

The new figures in American art and letters were also represented: at various times the salon attracted the artists Man Ray, Beatrice Wood, Charles Sheeler, Katherine Dreier, Charles Demuth, Clara Tice, and Frances Stevens, as well as poets Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, William Carlos Williams, writers Allen and Louise Norton and Bob Brown, and art critic Henry McBride.

[42] Loy contributed a (since lost) painting entitled Making Lampshades to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (formed in December 1916) at the Grand Central Palace New York which opened on 10 April 1917.

[43] With Walter Arensberg acting as the director and Marcel Duchamp as the head of the hanging committee, the show broke new ground in America as they ran with the slogan 'No jury, no prizes' as well as flouting tradition by displaying art works alphabetically, with no regard to reputation, and allowing anyone to enter for the price of $6.

"[1] Cravan was lost at sea without trace;[45] although some mistakenly claim that his body was found later in the desert (post-mortem, his life acquired even more epic proportions and dozens of stories proliferated).

Appearing to be somewhat mystified by the new kinds of poetry being produced by Loy and her ilk, Pound remarked in a March 1918 piece for Little Review, "In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatsoever", seeing them both as demonstrating logopoeia, the writing of poetry without caring for its music or imagism.

On 15 April 1946, she became a naturalised citizen of the United States under the name "Gertrude Mina Lloyd", resident at 302 East 66 Street in New York City.

She exhibited her found object art constructions in New York in 1951 and at the Bodley Gallery in 1959 in a show entitled 'Constructions' but she did not personally attend it.

[23] According to Loy biographer Burke, the loss of Giles, following as it did upon the disappearance or death of Cravan, precipitated struggles with her mental health.

[58][59] Recently in Argentina Camila Evia has translated and prepared an edition that includes the Feminist Manifesto and many poems by Mina Loy, making her legacy known in depth throughout Latin America.

[60] Nicholas Fox Weber wrote in the New York Times that "Mina Loy may never be more than a vaguely familiar name, a passing satellite, but at least she sparkled from an orbit of her own choosing.