All Before Me

Esther Rutter (Granta, £16.99)

Esther Rutter was in Japan when it happened. At 21 years old, she had gone to teach English in a rural part of the country and found herself isolated, alienated by the complex pictograms and multiple registers of the Japanese language.

She suffered a breakdown so severe that she was sectioned and eventually flown back to England. But Japan seems merely to have triggered a crisis that was many years in the making: unresolved issues from her father’s bankruptcy, which forced the family out of their home; her mother’s affair; her time at university, where she was taught to coldly dissect literature rather than enjoy it and where the pressures of academic work brought on dark moods and bouts of sleep paralysis.

Going to Japan had been a way of buying time after graduating, kicking the question of what she was going to do with her life further down the road. Instead, it brought her anxiety and insecurity to a head.

Back home, her self-esteem at an all-time low and convinced she could never be happy again, Esther applied for a residential internship with the Wordsworth Trust in Cumbria. She’d always liked poetry and always liked old things, and the job was based in the picturesque Dove Cottage in Grasmere, home of William Wordsworth and his beloved sister, Dorothy.

She would spend the next year there, taking part in guided tours, readings and workshops, assisting researchers and helping with the general upkeep of the property. It turned out to be just what she needed. All Before Me relates how her road to recovery was entwined with Dove Cottage, the Wordsworths and the bracing landscape of Cumbria.

Over time, Esther grew to understand the meaning of the cottage, and of the siblings’ lives, and applied those lessons to her own life. William and Dorothy were two of five children who were split apart when their mother died and distributed among various distant households. Dorothy and William wouldn’t see each other for nine years, and Dorothy never saw her father again. The peripatetic lives they had endured as children gave the concept of “home” a special significance for them. Reunited, they dreamed of a shared future and arrived in Grasmere in 1799 intent on creating a special home for themselves and – at least in Dorothy’s case – reclaiming the childhood they had been denied.

In the process, they created more than just a home for themselves but the symbolic heart of a Romantic ideal, based on “the need to feel kinship with nature and humanity, the desire to ‘see into the life of things’ through personal reflection, and the belief that the experiences of ordinary people are intrinsically important and worthwhile.” That ethic drew the poets Southey and Coleridge to them, the latter walking 40 miles for the chance to meet William and Dorothy.

All Before Me is an intimate and moving account of how living in that atmosphere became part of Esther’s self-therapy, reinforced by the supportive staff of the Wordsworth Trust, who awarded her the internship even after she burst into tears during her interview, and where her colleagues listened sympathetically to her fears.

Tying together memoir and biography, she trusts her instincts to guide her, free-associating between the Wordsworths’ lives, William’s “spiritual pantheism” and musings on language and nature, before winding up back at Dove Cottage again, where she clears drains, repurposes trees as hedges and senses an impending romance.

Like the landscape in which it’s set, it’s a book you can both get lost in and emerge from invigorated and renewed.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT