A. N. Jeffares was the Nestor of the study of Anglo-Irish Literature, which he was instrumental in establishing as an academic discipline. He was a gentleman-scholar with amazing energy, infectious bonhomie and unbending loyalty, who wore his learning lightly. Open to the creative expansion of the English curriculum, he was vigilant of the vagaries of intellectualism, shunning anything which he deemed prolix. Like Harold Bloom, he came to represent traditional values of literary criticism as a way of promulgating and protecting the subject he loved against the ever-refining web of dense literary theory and egalitarian cultural studies. He was renowned for his extensive work on Yeats, and on eighteenth-century Irish literature, but his many publications extend beyond the field of Irish studies, to include English, Commonwealth and American literature (he championed Walt Whitman). He was the general editor of various series of texts, of A Review of English Literature, of the influential Writers and Critics series of monographs, and of the York Notes. He edited the journals AREL and ARIEL. A pragmatic organiser with an enterprising spirit and a worldwide network of scholarly contacts, he held chairs in Adelaide, Leeds University and Stirling. He was chairman of PEN Scotland, and of Book Trust Scotland, Vice Chairman of the Scottish Arts Council, a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and honorary Doctor of the Universities of Stirling and Lille.

The son of an automobile importer, Derry descended from a long-established Wexford family with Tipperary and Scottish connections (his Scottish grandmother married ‘Irish Wully’ in Gretna Green). He was born during the War of Independence; his mother had been used as a human shield by a British soldier against Irish insurgents during the Easter Rising. He was educated at the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin. In April 1937, as a sixteen-year old editor of The Erasmian, the schoolboy magazine, he called on W.B. Yeats, a former pupil, who initially refused to contribute a poem because none of what he wrote was suitable for the eyes of the young, but a week later he sent Derry ‘What Then?’ Jeffares read Classics, and Ancient History and Political Science in Trinity College, Dublin, but, preferring the study of English literature, he wrote his dissertation on Yeats, his supervisor D. Nichol Smith adjuring him to write accessible English. This he did, beautifully; his standards were straightforward: anything he wrote was vetted by his wife Jeanne, and he could not understand scholars who baulked at that criterion. In 1944, after graduating, he, very much privately, published Trinity College Dublin, Founded 1591, a collection of his own drawings and descriptions (he was a fine draughtsman). He went on to Oriel College, Oxford, encountering a boorish C.S. Lewis, and writing his D.Phil. which led in 1948 to his pioneering scholarly biography, W.B. Yeats. Man and Poet .

The young academic had received and earned the trust of Yeats’s wife George and the poet’s intimate circle of friends (including Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult). They had given him access to unpublished correspondence, and had conversed freely. Jeffares would take exception to biographers from America who tried to buy that trust. Disclosing much, he yet retained as much discretion as Yeats’s family and friends required, as is manifest from all his work on Yeats, including the 1988 biography (which was written without the aid of his precious collection of books, which he had sold to the Princess Grace Library in Monaco) and the expansive publication of the intimate correspondence between Yeats and Maud Gonne which he edited in collaboration with Maud Gonne’s grand-daughter, Anna MacBride White, in 1993. With her and with Christina Bridgwater (Iseult’s granddaughter) he produced the Letters to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound from Iseult Gonne. A girl that knew all Dante once (2004), which convincingly explain, and humanise, the case for the friendship of Yeats and Iseult (he was rightly disappointed with the way his publisher produced and marketed this surprising revaluation of a much-misunderstood relationship). He despised biographers who did not shun the sensational, and questioned the recent vogue for all-inclusivenes. His voluminous work on Yeats included Commentaries on the Collected Poems (1968), and the Collected Plays (1975) (with A.S. Knowland), and A New Commentary on the Collected Poems (1984), all lavishly referenced and with detailed textual provenance. These, despite some trifling inadequacies (such as the misidentification of ‘the player Connolly’ in ‘Three Songs to One Burden’), remain invaluable to students of Yeats. His comprehensive edition of Yeats’s Collected Poems (1989) presented a sensible argument about the verse that Yeats himself had wished to preserve - at the time a controversy over the poet’s definitive selection and ordering of the verse was raging. It was followed by a welcome, annotated, edition of Yeats’s first version of A Vision . Derry edited various collections of criticism on Yeats, including In Excited Reverie (1965) (with K.G. Cross), featuring Conor Cruise O’Brien’s groundbreaking, albeit chronologically inaccurate, essay on Yeats’s flirtation with fascism (Derry once helped O’Brien by smuggling sensitive and perilous documents out of the Congo, where the latter was stationed). The Circus Animals (1970) contained one of Derry’s few priceless misquotes in the second line of ‘The Second Coming’ - ‘the falcon cannot leave the falconer’ - and offered sophisticated explanations of Yeats’s gyres and daemon.

Jeffares’ academic career started in 1946 as a lecturer in English at the University of Groningen, where he had to contend with the foibles of the Dutch linguist Prof. R.W. Zandvoort, and harsh post-War conditions. In 1947, he married Jeanne Calembert, whose Walonian father had spied for the British Secret Service in war-time Belgium. He had first met Jeanne, who studied at Edinburgh, at an inter-varsity debate in Glasgow. When Derry was offered a lectureship at Edinburgh University, he had to assure the Dutch Queen that he could look after his wife before being allowed to leave Holland (an assurance he honoured all his life). From Edinburgh, the Jeffares went on to Adelaide in 1951, where Derry took a chair in English Language and Literature (the circle of young professors there were known as ‘the Vice Chancellor’s kindergarten’, as he would recall with relish fifty years later).

In 1957 he became Professor of English Literature at Leeds University, where he worked closely with George Wilson Knight, the Shakespeare scholar. Following in Bonamy Dobrée’s footsteps, he published widely on Restoration drama, editing, in all, twenty-four Restoration Comedies for the Folio Society. Eighteenth-century Irish literature had his special affection; he edited several books on Congreve and Farquhar, and wrote extensively on Swift. His conviviality, promptitude and business acumen transformed Leeds into a vibrant international centre for the Humanities, with a remarkable interchange between the established disciplines and the many new ones introduced by Derry, who had remarkable talents for getting funding. His years in Australia had awakened his interest in Commonwealth literature, which he fostered in Leeds. He founded the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, enabling an influx of academic talent from Asia and Africa. He also established IASAIL (the association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature). He was known in Leeds as the Kingmaker.

Bored with Leeds, Derry took up a Chair at Stirling in 1974. He settled in an idyllic cottage in Fife Ness, and took an active part in Scottish arts administration. As Arts Councillor he aided the careers of such writers as Alasdair Gray, David Kelman and J.K. Rowling, for whom he may not have had the highest regard. Having established Academic Advisory Services as a consultant avant la lettre, he worked on a heterogeneous host of projects. He established the Edinburgh Book Festival. He became a director of the publisher Colin Smythe Ltd., continued publishing with Macmillan, and distributed his work among various publishing houses. His pioneering ‘popular’ history of Anglo-Irish Literature (1982) appeared in the Macmillan History of Literature series, of which he was general editor; A Pocket History of Irish Literature (1997) was published by The O’Brien Press, as was his anthology of Irish Love Poems (1997), while Kyle Cathie Limited produced the very handsome Ireland’s love poems: Wonder and Wild Desire (2000). Images of Invention (1996), Smythe’s publication of twenty-two essays Derry had written over the last two decades, display the scope of his interest in Irish literature, ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and refuting the accusation that he was top-heavy on poetry and drama.

Retired from Stirling, Derry produced two volumes of poetry which bear witness to a trust in aesthetic values, and a sense of fun; he exasperates over academic pretensions, and flaunts his love of cars (of which he knew everything, having owned one for each year of his life - he enjoyed a quiz in a local paper to identify cars from all eras, keeping the item alive with his informative answers). The poems are jubilant, impish, lyrical, and prosaic. He claimed that he knew nothing of scansion, a claim belied in such poems as the epithalamium on his daughter’s wedding.

His collaborations on projects increased. He worked with his close friend Brenadn Kennelly, the Irish poet and professor, on a selection of Joyce’s poetry and prose; with Kennelly and his protégée Katie Donovan on a selection of Irish women’s writings; with Arnold Kamm on a collection of impressions of an Irish childhood. Academe was no longer the gentleman’s profession as it had been in Leeds, and collaborations were now the only podium he could offer promising scholars - as he did, guiding them with gentle encouragement, and doing more than his share of the work.

His loyalties, if anything, grew stronger when running against academic vogues, which left him open to charges of Anglo-Irish conservatism. He was never afraid to put his name to literary causes which other academics cautiously shied away from - on Peter Tynan O’Mahony’s request he wrote a public letter to preserve Whitehall, where the young Katharine Tynan had offered a salon to the budding writers of the Irish Renaissance, from the total dereliction engineered by the Irish Rugby Union. Leaving himself open to charges of naiveté, he continued to defend Charles Lever against accusations of insensitivity, and championed Oliver St John Gogarty, whom he felt had been mistreated by the Joyce industry. In 2001 he produced the ambitious collected, edited, and annotated Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty, in which he presented 232 hitherto unpublished poems.

He wrote all his work in spidery long-hand, and employed typists, his only concession to recent technology being a fax machine; yet he was planning a multi-media project of Irish writers for the web, which fell through for lack of funding. Despite suffering from emphysema, which may have been caused from a plane spraying insecticide (he gave up pipe-smoking early in life), increasingly worrying bouts of breathlessness, and doses of steroids, he remained a total workhorse. Four years ago he undertook the enormous task of co-editing four anthologies of Irish Literature on the 18th and 19 th centuries, which he completed a week before his death. He was working on his memoirs, characteristically termed his ‘Anecdotes’. His sunny life was full of them.

He is survived by his wife, his daughter, and his grandson.