Baring, Maurice
Entry updated 4 November 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1874-1945) UK author, poet, playwright, translator, essayist, newspaper foreign correspondent, authority on Russia and diplomat who in World War One served in the RAF and Intelligence Corps, receiving an OBE in 1918. His literary associates included Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton. His first identified work of genre interest is "The Shadow of a Midnight: A Ghost Story" in The Morning Post for 6 October 1908, featuring Precognition of a violent crime two years in the future. This is collected in Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches (coll 1909), where other fantasy and supernatural fiction includes the Wellsian "Venus", whose protagonist unwillingly makes astral visits to Venus that are somehow triggered by telephone calls (see Technofantasy). There are vivid descriptions of tropical jungles, gigantic mushrooms and huge though unthreatening caterpillar-like Aliens; but also sensed is an Invisible predator from which local life flees; the visits soon become troubling and ultimately fatal. Several tales from Orpheus in Mayfair, including "Venus", reappear in the later Half a Minute's Silence and Other Stories (coll 1925), which also reprints "The Alternative" (November 1922 London Mercury). In this brief and jocular Alternate History whose Jonbar Point was Napoleon joining the British navy rather than the French army, Lord Byron became a Roman Catholic cardinal and Percy Bysshe Shelley a highly conservative MP, while the narrator's guide through the topsy-turvy world proves to be the great actor – rather than novelist – Charles Dickens. But in the traditional closing Cliché, this is all a dream.
Some of the spoof narratives by historical and fictional characters in the humorous Dead Letters (coll 1910) and Lost Diaries (coll 1913) are mildly fantasticated. In the latter, for example, Columbus sights a sea serpent (see Supernatural Creatures) and loses at poker to the gum- and tobacco-chewing inhabitants of his "newly discovered" land, Sherlock Holmes's deductions go awry, Shakespeare's Hamlet gets into disciplinary difficulties at Oxford University, and so on.
Baring was best known in his day for nonfantastic novels [not listed below] such as the lengthy character study C (1924). [DRL]
Maurice Baring
born London: 27 April 1874
died Beauly, Inverness: 14 December 1945
works (highly selected)
collections
- Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches (London: Mills and Boon, 1909) [coll: hb/]
- The Glass Mender and Other Stories (London: James Nisbet and Company, 1910) [coll: hb/]
- The Blue Rose Fairy Book (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911) [coll: vt of the above: hb/]
- Dead Letters (London: Constable, 1910) [coll: hb/]
- Lost Diaries (London: Duckworth, 1913) [coll: hb/]
- Unreliable History (London: William Heinemann, 1934) [omni of the above two plus Diminutive Dramas (coll 1919): hb/]
- Lost Diaries and Dead Letters (Gloucester, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1988) [omni of the above two: pb/]
- Half a Minute's Silence and Other Stories (London: William Heinemann, 1925) [coll: hb/nonpictorial]
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