page_title: Katharine Peabody Loring
section_title: Influence on Alice James
hierarchical_section_title: Katharine Peabody Loring / Influence on Alice James
caption_attribution_description: English: Alice James (reclining) and Katharine Loring, taken at the Royal Leamington Spa (England), c. 1890
context_page_description: Katharine Peabody Loring was an American educator. She was head of the history department at the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, the first correspondence school in the United States, where she developed a lifelong companionship with well-known diarist Alice James. She was also a trustee of the Beverly Public Library in Beverly, Massachusetts, and president of the Beverly Historical Society from 1918 to 1941.
context_section_description: Loring and James first met in December 1873. In 1875, James joined the Society and taught history alongside Loring, who was the head of the department. In the summer of 1879, Alice James wrote to Sara Darwin: 
  "I wish you could know Katharine Loring [...] she is a most wonderful being. She has all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman combined with all the distinctively feminine virtues. There is nothing she cannot do from hewing wood and drawing water to driving runaway horses and educating all the women in North America".
  Loring and James journeyed to the White Mountains in New Hampshire in the spring of 1880. During the journey they also visited Lake Winnipesaukee, Newport, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod. On May 21, 1881, Loring and James left for England, arriving on May 30. Initially staying in Richmond at the Star and Garter Hotel, on July 18 they moved temporarily to Kew to the house of Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist, and Jane Loring Gray, Loring's aunt. The Kew arrangements were unsuitable to James' needs, and they relocated to Sevenoaks at the end of July, and London, at 10 Clarges Street, in mid-August. In the beginning of September, with Henry James leaving for Scotland, James and Loring moved to his rooms at 4 Bolton Street. At the end of the month, they were back to the United States. Loring and James moved to England in 1884. James died on March 6, 1892.
  According to Leon Edel, Henry James loosely based his characters Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians upon Loring and his sister.
caption: Alice James (reclining) and Katharine Peabody Loring, taken at the Royal Leamington Spa (England), c. 1890
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