Ursula Bethell: Publishing the Poetry

Abstract

In August 1924, Ursula Bethell bought a cottage at 10 Westenra Terrace, on Cashmere Hill, Christchurch. The cottage commanded views of the Southern Alps to the west, the Pacific Ocean to the east, the Kaikouras to the north, and the plains and city spread out below. She invested it with the name 'Rise Cottage', in memory of the Bethell family seat in Yorkshire, and set up home in it with her friend of twenty years, Effie Henrietta Dorothea Pollen.

Ursula was in her fiftieth year, well-educated, well-travelled, and very religious, with private means, and a social conscience which had persuaded her to put aside her literary, artistic, and musical aspirations in 1897 for life as a social worker in South London, followed by five years' war work in the East End. When she travelled to New Zealand for the fifth and penultimate time in 1919, she may well have felt that she had 'done her bit' and wished, now, to be settled, for a while.