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.
