William Wordsworth’s life is the foundational version of the nature cure. After a disrupted, troubled childhood, sent to live with unsympathetic relations after his mother’s death, a chaotically disaffected time at Cambridge and a muddled youth, fathering a child on a woman he loved but scarcely knew in France, Wordsworth refused all his family’s urgings to a nice career in the church or the law. Instead, he stumbled towards the kind of poetry he wanted to write and looked, with his sister Dorothy, for a sense of home in Dorset and Somerset. Finally, he returned to the Lake District, and in December 1799 came to Dove Cottage and Grasmere, where nature felt like the parent he longed for and, surrounded by his coterie of women supporters, the years of agony could be over.

The irony, of course, is that the poetry he is largely remembered for – the extraordinary, homeless voice of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, the sudden surge of grandeur in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the first self-reshaping versions of The Prelude – were written before the cure was applied. Wordsworth’s greatness is tied to unhappiness, and to a sense that a longing for connection to nature, rather than the connection itself, is the fuel of what he has to say.

Esther Rutter’s memoir of her year as an intern at Dove Cottage piggybacks on Wordsworth’s life story. Her account mirrors his own: an unhappy, gifted childhood, with parenting that was not ideal, followed by an Oxford degree and a year in Japan. There she had a frightening breakdown, which left her unable to see a way forward. The prospect of a placement as a guide at Dove Cottage was both alluring and alarming. She dared to try it out and her gradual absorption in the community there of writers and Wordsworthians brought her increasing self-esteem, some confidence about who she was and what she might be, entrancement with the landscape and, finally, love, marriage, children and happiness.

It is a gentle, straightforward story. Rutter is frank about the difficulties of her childhood, of reading English at Oxford (which nearly destroyed her love of poetry) and the horrors of depression. Her experience was not of a black dog but of ‘a dark and silky crow, glossy and seductive, possessed of a voice that drove every sensible thought from my head and left me with a shadowscape of picked-clean corpses’. When that crow was screeching on her shoulder, reminding her of every wrong and selfish thing she had ever done, she would think of ‘putting a bullet through my skull to shut it up’.

Accompanying that bleakness is its opposite: not a fearful closing down but an appetite for everything the milieu of Grasmere could give her. At first her outreach is tentative. She is not sure that she will last in a world that seems so far from her native Suffolk. But she swims with the tide, likes the ebullience of those who are interning with her, and slowly the place has its influence. Wordsworth’s own embrace of Grasmere and the comforting sweetness of the buildings gathered around Dove Cottage at Town End are set alongside everything enshrined by the modern institution of what is now called ‘Wordsworth Grasmere’.

The hero of the book is neither Wordsworth nor the beautiful, rock-climbing, clever, kind Tom who, after being much longed for when seen across the pub or glimpsed in the shower, eventually marries the author. Surprisingly, perhaps, the hero is the scholar Robert Woof, who died in 2005, but who, as director of the Wordsworth Trust, had created at Grasmere the archive and museum which has made it the world centre of Wordsworth studies.

Just as important to Rutter as Woof’s efforts to preserve the manuscripts and notebooks that had previously been mouldering in cardboard boxes was his insistence on making Grasmere a hub of vivid poetic life. He filled it with poets and poetry, encouraging the fusion of ancient and modern on which she also finds herself thriving. Woof had been stirred when, as an 18-year-old touring on his bicycle, he first saw Dove Cottage: ‘By the time I got back home, it was burned into my imagination that there was such a place.’

Wordsworth had felt the same. And so Rutter records a kind of apostolic succession: Wordsworth to Woof, Woof to herself and, as she happily acknowledges, to hundreds of others like her. The first aim of the founders of the Wordsworth Trust in 1890 had been to secure Dove Cottage and its collection ‘for the eternal possession of those who love English poetry all over the world’. The lasting impression of the book Rutter has written is the unaffectedness of her gratitude for that gift.