Maurice Baring, a prolific writer of wide artistic range, belongs in the category of English Catholic authors with G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. His publications, numbering over fifty books, ranging from poetry and drama to literary criticism and parody, included an autobiography and some fifteen novels. The novels, easily his greatest achievements, are unassuming portraits, written in the barest and most lucid of styles, of the star-crossed loves and spiritual quests of sensitive and cultivated members of the cosmopolitan elite. Remarkably consistent in subject, theme, and technique, they read almost as separate chapters of a single, continuous work. Although Baring's fictive world is a closed one, it is painstakingly realistic. The lives of princesses, lords and ladies, diplomats and writers strike one as being very ordinary. None of his protagonists, with all their flawed decisions and disappointments, are exceptional or strong enough to...