In The End Is My Beginning - Softcover

This historical novel tells the tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots, from her childhood until the beginning of her end, whose unwise marital and political actions provoked rebellion among Scottish nobles and forced her to flee to England, where she was beheaded as a Roman Catholic threat to the throne. The clash of opinion over whether Mary was a martyr or a murderess is perfectly represented by four eye-witnesses (The Four Maries – her ladies-in-waiting) who narrate this captivating story with distinctive conclusions.

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.