The relationship between Alice James and Katharine Peabody Loring was one of the most well-known Boston Marriages and the characters on which Henry James' based Olive and Verena in his novel, The Bostonians. "A devotion so perfect and generous ... was a gift so rare ... that to brush it aside would be almost an act of impiety," said Henry James of his sister's relationship. The pair first met in 1873. By 1879, Katharine was, according to one Alice's biographers, "man and woman, father, and mother, nurse and protector, intellectual partner and friend," to her. [History Project]
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