[1] Elsa Vesta Goveia was born on 12 April 1925[2] in British Guiana to middle-class, ethnically mixed Portuguese and Afro-Guyanese family.

Furthering her studies, Goveia attended the Institute of Historical Research in London under the tutelage of Eveline Martin until 1950, when she returned to the Caribbean and accepted a post at the newly created University College of the West Indies, as an assistant lecturer.

[6] Continuing her research during 1950 and 1951, Goveia prepared her thesis Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands 1780-1800, submitted it the following year and earned her PhD in 1952.

Prior to Goveia, history of the Caribbean had focused on the economics of slavery and its political implications, [9] following a chronological sequence without regard to the larger context.

[10] Goveia, instead, analyzed the sociological impact of the slaves, free blacks, and other elements of society and how they functioned both as separate communities and as part of the whole.

It was an innovation to scholarship that forced scholars to consider the social history and a more interdisciplinary approach to analysis, questioning the historiography of the region.

[26] From 1961, Goveia had health issues which curtailed her publishing output to an extent, but she continued teaching until her untimely death at age fifty-four.