The Lonely Lady Of Dulwich

The Lonely Lady Of Dulwich

The novel portrays the life of a lonely, beautiful, yet over-protected Catholic girl and the several loves of her long life. A struggle develops between the demands of love and religious orthodoxy and matters of conscience are examined in significant detail. The story takes place against the background of upper-class English and French life at the turn of the twentieth century, and is written in a delightfully light and graceful style. Born in London in 1874, Maurice Baring 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 the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria; later he was a correspondent in Russia and Constantinople. He is credited with 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, his work highly regarded to this day for the acute intimate portraits of the time.