ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the kaleidoscopic views of Ford so as to present his life through his own and others' life-writings. The emphasis is on what he writes about his own life. Before the First World War, the focal points of Ford's life and thus of Return to Yesterday, the later autobiographical volume that takes up the story of his young manhood were London, where he was born, and the south coast, where he had been sent to a boarding school. Ford was fifteen when his father died suddenly in 1889. That was when Ford and his brother Oliver had to go and live with Madox Brown, their sister Juliet staying with their widowed mother. In 1894, Ford married his girlfriend from his first school, Elsie Martindale, the daughter of a prosperous pharmacologist who thought Ford an unsuitable suitor. The other main after-effect of the protracted strain of the collaboration was Ford's severe agoraphobic breakdown in 1904.
