 Rae reportedly applied to the Royal Academy of Arts at least five times before eventually gaining a seven-year scholarship.Her teachers there included Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who had the strongest influence on her later work, as well as Frank Bernard Dicksee and William Powell Frith.In 1884 she married painter and fellow Royal Academy student Ernest Normand, but kept her maiden name – a choice considered unusual at the time – because she had already begun to establish her reputation as an artist, having been a frequent exhibitor at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions since 1881.