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.

[2] In the spring of 1888, while travelling to Florida and South Carolina with her father and sister, Loring met Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, with whom she was a lifelong friend.

[5] Despite lacking formal education, Loring was an avid reader and travelled widely, unusual for women at the time.

[2] Because of her interest in politics and foreign affairs, Loring helped Anna Ticknor found the Society to Encourage Studies at Home in 1873 to contribute to women's education.

[2] In 1871 Katharine Loring, together with Julia Ward Howe, founded the Saturday Morning Club, an organization for women's communal and intellectual growth in Boston.

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.

[12] According to Leon Edel, Henry James loosely based his characters Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians upon Loring and his sister.

[13] At the beginning of the 20th century, when the nouveau riche arrived to Beverly from New York, they started to buy the old-Bostonian family mansions.

[15][8] In 1917, Katharine helped compile the Loring family genealogy and in 1932 she wrote The Earliest Summer Residents of the North Shore and Their Houses.