Overlooked

Maurice Baring

Sep 2014 · House of Stratus

About this ebook

Anthony Kay, a blind man, meets a gathering of people and quickly becomes involved in their lives. One of them is novelist James Rudd, who decides to study and write about the characters around him. The story he ends up with is very different to the one Kay would have told .... Maurice Baring skillfully blends the objective and subjective, questioning the concept of sight in a portrait of characters whose lives are destined to be intertwined. As with crime incidents in the modern era, witnesses may see the same things, but their interpretation and recall can be very different.

About the author

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.