All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworths Lake District

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In her twenties, Esther Rutter suffered an acute mental breakdown while living in Japan. Sectioned and held in a Japanese psychiatric institution until she could be flown home under escort, her recovery only began when she took a job in the Lake District at Dove Cottage, the home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

Like Dorothy and William before her, whose search for Dove Cottage was borne out of the dislocation they experienced during their childhood, Esther realised that she was looking for a place to feel at home, and most like herself. In their lives and writings, she discovered an approach to understanding the self as sophisticated as the psychoanalysis of Freud that followed a century later: a desire to 'see into the life of things' through personal reflection, and the belief that the experiences of ordinary people are intrinsically worthwhile and important. With their insights and creativity to guide her, and amid the beautiful landscape around Dove Cottage, she made lifelong bonds of friendship, community - and love.

All Before Me is a moving and absorbing account of the struggle to know oneself on the journey into adulthood, intertwined with the stories of the Wordsworth siblings at Dove Cottage. In the beautiful hamlet of Town End, where a cultural epoch was borne that would forever shape the way we experience the world, Esther found the spirit of place that sustains and inspires, making possible all that lies before us.

Reviews

[A] revivifying blend of memoir, literary history and travelogue... [All Before Me is] alive with fascinating episodes and potted histories and, even more importantly, a heartfelt commitment to the power of place and of poetry to sustain lives and minds * Observer *
An illuminating blend of Esther's own personal history with the history of the Wordsworth Trust as a home and museum, capturing a lost era in the lively descriptions of the life-changing year Esther spent in Grasmere in 2009 -- Polly Atkin
Heartfelt, playful, deadly serious - this is a compelling story of what it means to find yourself through landscape and literary legacy... A book full of hope -- Helen Mort
All Before Me is a joy. Weaving her own personal story with those of the Wordsworths and their friends, it's a book about falling in love with life and with a very particular, wild landscape. I loved it -- Lulah Ellender
Intimate and moving... Like the landscape in which it's set, it's a book you can both get lost in and emerge from invigorated and renewed * Herald *
All Before Me...is a poem, a song of the self * TLS *

Author Bio

Esther Rutter studied English at Oxford University's Magdalen College, where she held an academic scholarship. She has worked at the Wordsworth Trust and at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, and is a Research Fellow specialising in landscapes and cultural identity at the University of St Andrews. Her first book, This Golden Fleece, was published by Granta in 2019. She lives in Fife.