BARING, MAURICE. - English writer, b. in London on 27 April 1874, to an aristocratic family, d. on 14 December 1945. He was educated at Eton, where he met Arthur Benson, who initiated him into the study of Russian literature. He embarked on a diplomatic career, which he abandoned in 1903. At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, he was sent as a correspondent for the Morning Post to Moscow, and remained there until 1907. Subsequently he devoted himself entirely to literature. In 1909 he converted to Catholicism: "the only action of my whole life that I am sure I have never regretted," as he wrote on the subject.
He is, along with Belloc and Chesterton, among the most distinguished English Catholic writers. He writes in a highly controlled and refined language, and is an exquisite psychologist. He has written essays on the history and literature of Russia, poetry, drama, and some novels with a historical-symbolic basis and of a psychological-religious character, which are perhaps the best among his works. The best known are: Cat's Cradle, Daphne Adeane (1926) and Robert Peckham (1936), the latter the story of an English refugee who, having left his country in the wake of the schism, dies in Rome rather than betray his faith, because, as he wishes to have written on his epitaph, "he could not live far from his homeland." Two of his novels, The Coat without a Seam (La tunica senza cucitura) and Daphne Adeane have been translated into Italian.