Maurice Baring was born in London in 1874. He was a man of letters, a scion of a family long prominent in the financial ventures of the British Empire. The son of the 1st Baron Revelstoke (a director of the Bank of England and a senior partner at Baring Bros.), he was educated at Eton and at Cambridge and joined the diplomatic service in 1898. In 1904 he became a journalist and reported on the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria; later he was a correspondent in Russia and Constantinople. He is credited for having discovered Chekov’s work in Moscow and helping to introduce it to the West. Baring is remembered as a versatile, prolific and highly successful writer, who produced articles, plays, biographies, criticism, poetry, translations, stories, and novels. He is regarded as a representative of the social culture that flourished in England before World War I, and his work is highly regarded to this day for the acute intimate portraits of the time. He died of Parkinson’s disease in 1945.
