What’s become of Baring?
Maurice Baring is one of those writers of whom it is periodically said that he is unjustly forgotten and ripe for reappraisal. In his own lifetime, he was a prolific and popular author: a uniform edition of his work published by Heinemann in 1925 lists over 50 works — novels, plays, anthologies, poetry, memoirs and reportage — most of which are now out of print. Clearly, the very volume of his output has made it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff: in the 1970s Edmund Wilson wrote an essay entitled ‘How Not to Be Bored by Maurice Baring’. Baring was born in 1874 into one of the grandest