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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. (1995). 9780908912049, Bridget Williams Books Ltd. ISBN 9780908912049 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.
Her father died in April 1885. Two years later, at age 15, she travelled back to England and boarded with the family of Ruth Mayhew, who became a lifelong friend, 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. Having enough private wealth to support herself, she took up social work in London with the Anglican organisation Women Workers for God, or "Grey Ladies". She continued to perform social work in a religious context in England and New Zealand, travelling between the two, including in the war years.
In 1924 Bethell permanently settled in New Zealand, in the Cashmere Hills near Christchurch. She bought a newly built home, Rise Cottage in Westenra Terrace, which she shared with another returnee New Zealander, Effie Pollen. 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.Janet Charman: "My Ursula Bethell", Women's Studies Journal 14.2 (Spring 1998), pp. 91–108 Retrieved 8 April 2015. 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.
Her first collection, From a Garden in the Antipodies (1929), is her best-known work; its poems have often been anthologised. It expresses an awareness of her separation from "loved and lost London", and themes of religious thought and nature that marked all her work. Her later collections include poems for which there had been no place in the first collection, and memorial poems to Pollen. Her poetry is ascribed by the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English "a plainness and spareness (as well as freshness of image) which distinguishes it from the more ornamented verse the country had previously produced."
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. She acted as a mentor to younger local poets, notably Allen Curnow and Denis Glover.
All Bethell's work appeared anonymously, as she felt that publicity in "provincial New Zealand" would be a "painful affair". She said her pseudonym, Evelyn Hayes, came from a great-great-grandfather, Sir Henry Hayes of Cork, who was "deported for life to Botany Bay for attempted abduction of a Quakers heiress."Letter to Sidgwick and Jackson, Bethel's London publishers, July 1929. Quoted by O'Sullivan. 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.
She featured prominently in both of Curnow's notable anthologies, A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–1945 (1945) (in which 19 of her poems were printed, more than any other poet) and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), and later in The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985) edited by Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen.
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.
Bethell's personal and literary notes were archived by the Macmillan Brown Library of the University of Canterbury. In 2021, these archival papers were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao register.
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