ELAINE O'BEIRNE RANELAGH, folklorist and writer, died last April (Good Friday) in a London hospital. She was the widow of the late Jim O'Beirne, who was well known in republican circles, but she had a distinguished career in her own right, both as a scholar of Irish legends and as author of Himself And I.
The book gave a picture of life in the Irish countryside in the 1950s that was simultaneously poignant, humorous and acute. It fell foul of the ecclesiastical authorities and was banned here, but perhaps for that very reason, sold spectacularly among Irish people travelling abroad.
Elaine Lewis was born in New York on July 6th, 1914. She studied classics at Vassar and folklore at the University of Indiana, which awarded her a Guggenheim Fellowship to research Italian fairy stories. In Rome, she met Mussolini. Back in the States again, she turned to American music, concentrating on jazz, negro spirituals and the traditional outpourings of the slaves on the antebellum plantations. She helped to popularise through radio broadcasts the work of Leadbelly (Huddy Leadetter) and it was while working on a programme about Irish folklore that she met her, future husband, Jim. They married in 1946 and he brought her back to Ireland.
Himself And I, written under the pseudonym Anne O'NeillBarna and published in 1958 by Heinemann, tells how a sophisticated urban American woman and her husband, an Irish chieftain with an (old) IRA past, reject the ruinous, ancestral house in the Wicklow Mountains and settle in a more modern affair, a Georgian structure in the Midlands. The details were true, only the names had been changed. The new house, called Barravore in the book, is in reality Kilberry Glebe. It is still standing near Athy, Co Kildare. Anne's husband Bill, The O'Neill Barna of the book, was in reality James, The O'Beirne Ranelagh, chief of his clan.
Later the O'Beirne Ranelaghs moved to Dalkey and later still, for the children's education, to England. Elaine lectured in the Cambridge area and wrote books on many more topics, such as male female relations (she was a feminist before her time) or the West's debt to Arab culture. She also compiled a number of rugby joke anthologies - a 20th century variation on the folk tale collections her early training bad steered her towards.
It is hoped that her important collection of folklore material, particularly the Irish part, will be left to a seat of higher learning here - perhaps University College, Dublin. She leaves four children, one of whom, the author and broadcaster John Ranelagh, helped Robert Kee to make the 1980 BBC TV series on the history of Ireland.