From the time of his mother's death, in 1922, Grainger's view of life became increasingly retrospective. Over his remaining nearly forty years he reviewed his life firstly romantically, then wistfully, and finally with a contrary bitterness often in blatant defiance of the facts. His unpublished autobiographical writings are vast, totalling over 250,000 words. During the 1920s and 1930s he was obsessed with a most detailed review of every facet of life with his mother, and also wrote of the early courtship with his wife, Ella, in ‘The Love-life of Helen and Paris’ (1927–28). The first two recollections below are drawn from these earlier writings. The long essays ‘Ere-Iforget’ and ‘Anecdotes’ from the 1940s and 1950s are more wideranging recollections. In 1951 Grainger determined to draw his memories into a definitive autobiography, ‘My Wretched Tone-life’, but only appears to have sketched its tortured three-page introduction, also given below. Many of Grainger's recollections were written in his personal ‘Nordic’ or ‘Blue-eyed’ English. Fortunately for the uninitiated, he usually added Graeco-Latin synonyms in parentheses.