Mary Ursula Bethell

Mary Ursula Bethell (pseudonym, Evelyn Hayes; 6 October 1874 – 15 January 1945) was a New Zealand poet. She settled at the age of 50 at Rise Cottage on the Cashmere Hills near Christchurch, with her companion Effie Pollen, where she created a sheltered garden with views over the city and towards the Southern Alps, and began writing poems about the landscape. Although she considered herself "by birth and choice English", and spent her life travelling between England and New Zealand, she was one of the first distinctively New Zealand poets, seen today as a pioneer of its modern poetry.

Background and social work Bethell was the eldest daughter of the well-to-do sheep farmer Richard Bethell and his wife Isabel Anne, née Lillie, and was born in Horsell, Surrey, England, in 1874. Her parents had both lived in New Zealand in the 1860s, but returned to London where they married.

Her father died in April 1885. as she attended Oxford High School for Girls and a Swiss finishing school. She returned to New Zealand in 1892 and devoted herself to charitable work, before again returning to Europe in 1895 to study painting in Geneva and music in Dresden. The theory that Bethell's relationship with Pollen was homosexual (which would have sat ill with her Anglicanism and her social aspirations in that period) was explored in some detail by the fellow poet Janet Charman, as a visiting scholar at the University of Auckland in 1997. Bethell herself described the relationship as "prevailingly maternal", but there is no way of knowing for sure what the relationship between them was, except that it was a close and loving relationship.

The New Zealand writer Charles Brasch, visiting Bethell in the late 1930s, found her at "the centre of an astonishingly diverse circle of interesting people, many of the younger of whom were so close to her that she almost directed their lives." Among them were the crime writer Ngaio Marsh, the essayist M. H. Holcroft, the artists R. H. Field and Evelyn Margaret Page, the poets Blanche Edith Baughan and J. H. E. Schroder, and the musician Frederick Joseph Page. In later life, she became less keen to be anonymous, and before her death asked that her collected poems be published under her own name. The poet and journalist D'Arcy Cresswell said that in literature "New Zealand wasn't truly discovered, in fact, until Ursula Bethell, 'very earnestly digging', raised her head to look at the mountains. Almost everyone had been blind before."

In 1979, the University of Canterbury founded the Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing to support and encourage New Zealand writing. It goes to writers of "proven merit". Notable recipients have included Margaret Mahy, Keri Hulme and Eleanor Catton.

Published works (As Evelyn Hayes) From a Garden in the Antipodes (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1929) (As "The Author of Poems From a Garden in the Antipodes") Time and Place (Christchurch: Caxton, 1936) (As "The Author of Time and Place") Day and Night: Poems 1924–1934, (Christchurch: Caxton, 1939) Collected Poems, ed. Helen Simpson, (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1950), (Kindle edition 2016, ASIN: B016QNELZ4) Collected Poems, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan, (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1985 ) Vibrant with Words: The Letters of Ursula Bethell, ed. Peter Whiteford (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005).