All Before Me | Granta

  • Published: 07/03/2024
  • ISBN: 9781783787951
  • Granta Books
  • 352 pages

All Before Me

Esther Rutter

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 borne 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.

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

The Author

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 currently Writer in Residence at the University of St Andrews. Growing up on a sheep farm in Suffolk – where as child she learned to spin, weave and knit – she retains an affection for all things woolly. She lives in Fife. You can follow her knitting adventures on Instagram @thisgoldenfleece and Twitter @thisgoldfleece.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

This Golden Fleece

Esther Rutter

Over the course of a year, Esther Rutter – who grew up on a sheep farm in Suffolk, and learned to spin, weave and knit as a child – travels the length of the British Isles, to tell the story of wool’s long history here.

She unearths fascinating histories of communities whose lives were shaped by wool, from the mill workers of the Border countries, to the English market towns built on profits of the wool trade, and the Highland communities cleared for sheep farming; and finds tradition and innovation intermingling in today’s knitwear industries. Along the way, she explores wool’s rich culture by knitting and crafting culturally significant garments from our history – among them gloves, a scarf, a baby blanket, socks and a fisherman’s jumper – reminding us of the value of craft and our intimate relationship with wool.

This Golden Fleece is at once a meditation on the craft and history of knitting, and a fascinating exploration of wool’s influence on our landscape, history and culture.

Esther Rutter on Granta.com

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Esther Rutter on why A House with Four Rooms by Rumer Godden is the best book of 1989.

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Making

Esther Rutter

‘Are you a writer who knits, or a knitter who writes?’