Photo credit: StuckinaBook
As I was reading about this fascinating book, I could not believe my eyes, how much and how deeply it was resonating with me, my life, my journey, pain, healing, finding joy, appreciating mother nature, finding solace in poetry and much more. This is why I am so happy for the opportunity of sharing this with you, the reader and visitor of this website. So come along and let us journey together, you, me and Esther Rutter.
But, first, I must note why and how Rutter's book and journey so much resonates with me. To this end I can do no better than sharing the following links with you. Please have a look and you will discover amply for yourselves:
Coventry and I: The story of a boy from Iran who became a man in Coventry
On the 250th Birthday of William Wordsworth Let Nature be our Wisest Teacher
What a blissful day it was visiting "The loveliest spot that man hath ever found"
World in Chaos and Despair: The Healing Power of Nature-Based Education
World in Chaos and Despair: The Healing Power of Poetry
Dove Cottage, the place where poetry changed forever.
'Here should be my home, this valley be my world.'
Standing infront of Dove Cottage, November 2021. Photo: Anne Mofid
Photo: Anne Mofid
All Before Me by Esther Rutter review – the healing power of place and poetry
‘Filled with fascinating potted histories, this memoir of a year spent at Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage following a breakdown is wonderfully revivifying.’
‘After a breakdown, I found salvation and love in the Lake District'-Photo credit: The Times.
‘The concept of “genius loci” – the spirit of a place, often with a connotation of protection or nurturing – is the foundation of Esther Rutter’s revivifying blend of memoir, literary history and travelogue. Eliding three books into one, she explores her own terrifying mental collapse and tentative recovery, the lives of Romantic poet William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their confrère Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the efforts to preserve the Wordsworths’ cottage at Grasmere within the context of the Lake District as a whole. At times, the reader may feel a little too aware of the compression mechanism at work, but the book is nonetheless 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.
Grasmere was not Rutter’s first attempt to transport herself to an entirely unfamiliar landscape and thereby to find a new direction for her life. As a 21-year-old, she set off to teach English in a small Japanese village, living alone in a rented apartment with very little Japanese at her disposal. This was not a grand gap year adventure born of a privileged upbringing – Rutter writes effectively about the challenges and ruptures in her familial environment – but an attempt to get close up to another culture and way of being.
‘And it was working, until she suffered a sudden breakdown of her mental health, a sort of dissolution of the self: severe anxiety attacks, agitation and a deep-seated feeling in her body that “happiness would forever pass me by”. Within a couple of weeks, she had been admitted to a psychiatric facility, where she was shown great kindness but remained unclear as to the path toward diagnosis and treatment; and then, an abrupt return home. In one sense, she was back where she started; in another, she was profoundly and permanently altered.
Where does Wordsworth come in?' … Continue to read
Photo credit: Wordsworth Grasmere
‘In her early twenties, Esther Rutter suffered an acute mental breakdown while teaching English in Japan. Sectioned and held in a Japanese psychiatric institution until she could be flown home under escort, her recovery only began when she came to live and work in the Lake District at Dove Cottage, the home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
Here, amid the beauty of the mountainous landscape and close to the extraordinary legacy of the Wordsworths, Esther began to heal. 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 the Wordsworths' lives and writings, she discovered an approach to understanding herself 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. And in the community of fellow interns, colleagues, poets and villagers, she made lifelong bonds of friendship, and finally, 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 born that would forever shape the way we experience the world, Esther found the spirit of place to sustain and anchor her, and make possible all that lay before her.’
Buy it HERE
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