Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine Goddard Goddard and Major Henry Goddard. Her maternal grandfather was the multi-millionaire Isaac S. Waterman, Jr. Her parents divorced when she was small, and her father abandoned the family. Beatrice was raised by her mother, who was unstable and abused her emotionally while doting on her mentally ill brother, St. Mar. They lived mostly in New York, where from an early age Goddard had to tend to St. Mar because he attacked anyone else who came near him. According to her memoir, when she was seven, her mother fostered her to a poor family living in a New York City tenement, then disappeared and stopped making the agreed-upon payments. The family continued to care for Beatrice, although they sank further into poverty. She did not tell them where her grandfather lived for fear of being returned to her mother.
After the foster family located her grandfather on their own, he arranged to send Beatrice to study for several years at St. Mary's Hall (now: Doane Academy) an Episcopal girls boarding school in Burlington, New Jersey. Later she attended a convent school, in between times spent with her mother, who moved around Europe constantly, although the stress of travel made St. Mar harder to control. In adulthood Goddard Brooks referred to herself as having been a "child-martyr".
In 1893 at the age of 19, Goddard left her family and went to Paris. She extracted a meager allowance from her mother, took voice lessons, and for a time sang in a cabaret, before finding out she was pregnant and delivering a baby girl on February 17, 1897. She placed the infant in a convent for care, then travelled to Rome to study art. Goddard was the only female student in her life class, as it was unusual for women to work from nude models. She encountered what would now be called sexual harassment. When a fellow student left a book open on her stool with pornographic passages underlined, she picked it up and hit him in the face with it, but he and his friends stalked her. She fled to Capri after he tried to force her to marry him.
In the summer of 1899 Goddard rented a studio in the poorest part of the island of Capri, which was a very inexpensive place to live. Still her funds were insufficient. After several months of near starvation, she suffered a physical breakdown. In 1901 her brother St. Mar died. She returned to New York to help care for her grief-stricken mother, who died less than a year later from complications of advanced diabetes. Goddard was 28 when she and her sister inherited the large estate which their Waterman grandfather had left, which made them independently wealthy.
On 13 June 1903 Goddard married her friend John Ellingham Brooks, an unsuccessful pianist and translator who was in deep financial difficulty. He was homosexual and Goddard never revealed exactly why she married him. Her first biographer Meryle Secrest suggests that she was motivated by concern for him and a desire for companionship, rather than the need for a marriage of convenience. They quarreled almost immediately when she cut her hair and ordered men's clothes for a planned walking tour of England; he refused to be seen in public with her dressed that way. Chafing at his desire for outward propriety, she left him after only a year and moved to London. He frightened her because he kept making references to "our" money. Brooks spent the rest of his life on Capri (where he died in 1929) and, for a while, lived there with E. F. Benson, author of the Mapp and Lucia novels.

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