All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District

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.