She was a daughter of Joseph Hobbins, M. D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, and of Sarah Badger Jackson, a native of Newton, Massachusetts.

[1] Joseph Hobbins arrived in Madison, Wisconsin with his family in 1854,[3] and it is here that Alice's early life was spent.

She wrote a series of letters for a syndicate, embracing thirty of the principal journals of the country, and special letters to the New York World, The Philadelphia Press, National Tribune, and other papers, most of which were reprinted in England.

She edited Mr. Porter's letters and essays on the condition of the working classes abroad.

During Mary's teen years, the family moved to Rome for her father's work and required a long stay in the city due to her mother becoming ill.[7][8][9] Alice Russell Hobbins Porter died in 1926.