Uncovering the Influence of Mary Eliza Haweis in Mina Loy's "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose": "Consider your mother-in-law's stays"

Mina Loy's art and politics seem to spring fully formed from the modernist impulse to sweep away the old and formulate new ways of making art and living in the modern world. Yet Loy herself often reflected on her upbringing in late-Victorian London, writing short sketches about Dante Gabriel Rossetti and numerous unpublished autobiographical manuscripts that explore the challenges and disappointments of her younger years, such as "Anglo Mongrels and the Rose"; it is both an atypical artist's coming-of-age tale and a complex act of self-fashioning. This article explores how Mary Eliza Haweis (in the poem Patricia Penfold), a largely forgotten figure today but a prominent figure in late-nineteenth-century London's cultural milieu, disrupts the poem's narrative and exerts a fundamental though disavowed influence on Loy. In revealing Haweis's role we learn why Loy so emphatically dismissed it. [137 words]