I remember my Oxford interview vividly. Having studied at a 1970s state-funded secondary school, I chose Magdalen because it had everything I wanted: beautiful old buildings, famous alumni, and accommodation in college throughout your degree course. When I arrived one cold, misty evening in early December, I felt like I had stepped into Narnia. In a way, I had: C.S. Lewis had been a tutor there, and statues of mythic beasts edged the cloistered quad, frozen in time and rimed with ice.
The following day I woke early, nerves jangling in anticipation of the interview. The sun had not yet risen and I snuck out in the half-light, passing frosty lawns on my way to the river that snaked beside the college. The water was shrouded in mist but, beyond the bridge, I could see the tops of grander buildings reaching for the first light of the day. The interview nerves faded as I walked along the riverside, spellbound with the beauty of that morning.
Two hours later I was handed a sheet of poems. One was ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’, with its ‘domes, towers and cathedrals’ at sunrise: ‘a sight so touching in its majesty!’ It was a description of my daybreak hours, and I understood at once the poem’s vivid ecstasy. After discussing Wordsworth, we talked about Donne, Shakespeare, and Defoe, and I had a sense, even before the interview was over, that I had got a place. Wordsworth’s words felt like a portent, a guarantee of goodness.
Four years later, on a similarly cold December night, I lay in a very different bed, once more struggling to sleep. I was in an attic bedroom in the Lakeland village of Grasmere, less twenty feet from Dove Cottage, William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s home. Again, I was awaiting an interview – though the circumstances for this one could not have been more different.
After completing my degree, I moved to Japan to teach English, living in a small mountain village close to Hiroshima. As the months passed, I began to feel increasingly ill at ease, gripped alternately by anxiety and depression. My mind swirled, I lost my appetite, and eventually became unable to sleep. Yet I did not recognise that I was ill; instead, I thought that I was simply a terrible failure of a person. Almost a year into my time there, I had had a mental breakdown, culminating in being sectioned in a Japanese psychiatric hospital.
After returning to England under medical escort, I spent many months trying to make sense of what had happened, and what I could now do with my life. I tried to work and even attempted a journalism course, but my mind refused to focus; a series of doctors’ notes continued to confirm that I was ill. I applied for graduate job after graduate job, but no one would hire me. Looking into the void that had become my life made me sick and dizzy.
Then a small miracle happened. A tiny piece of ordinary magic that, like stones falling into a river, altered my course. I found an advert that offered the chance of something better: a paid internship with the Wordsworth Trust, fully residential, with a small stiped to live on in exchange for giving tours of the Wordsworths’ home. The money was no more than the benefits I was claiming for being out of work, but it would guarantee me a reason to get up each morning.
Two days after applying I was called to interview. Lying in the dark in Grasmere that December night, the memory of that morning before my Magdalen interview felt like a talisman. I replayed the poem’s last lines in my head: ‘Dear god! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!’ It was as hopeful and relevant a portent as it had been four years earlier: the following day, I had the interview and was offered a place.
That was the start of the rest of my life. Though my early months in Grasmere continued to be shadowed by illness, by the time summer came I was back to full health and thoroughly enjoying life again. I had found a new community, including a group of friends that I count among my favourite people to this day. Whilst Oxford honed my writing skills, Grasmere gave me the confidence to use them, and at the end of my internship I had my first piece of writing published. It took me another decade to write a whole book – This Golden Fleece, published by Granta in 2019 – and in 2024 my second book, All Before Me came out, which tells the story of that transformative year among poets – Romantic and contemporary – in the Lake District. It is a paean to the power of poetry, place and people – and both the writing of the book and the events it describes were profoundly shaped by my time at Oxford.
Esther Rutter (Magdalen, 2004) is the author of literary memoir All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District (Granta, 2024) and award-winning non-fiction book This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain’s Knitted History (Granta, 2019). Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (2021-2025), she is now a PhD Student at the University of Leeds (2025-2029), funded by White Rose College of Arts and Humanities AHRC/UKRI), researching female artistic-literary partnerships of the 20th century.
