About Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, mother Maria Alfonsa (Lenox, May 20, 1851 - Hawthorne, July 9, 1926), was an American religious, founder of the Dominican Sisters of Santa Rosa da Lima. She was the youngest daughter of the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, and was religiously educated in the Unitarian faith. In 1871 she married George Parsons Lathrop, also a writer. After a summer experience at the Georgetown Visitation Monastery, Rose and her husband converted to Catholicism in 1891. During this time she wrote several poems and contributed to some magazines, especially Catholic ones.Together with Alice Huber, around 1896 Rose Hawthorne began to devote herself to assisting cancer patients and in 1898, on the death of her husband, she thought of founding a religious congregation for the relief of the incurable. Her approach to charity works and after having met the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul of Halifax in Wellesley (Massachusetts) and the death of her friend Emma Lazarus, in 1887, due to cancer, she decided train as a nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In 1925, she received her master of arts from Bowdoin College (University of Maine).
She died at the motherhouse in New York on July 9, 1926, in her sleep.
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