Ramsay attended Otago Girls' High School, where she won a university entrance scholarship in 1964.
[2] Ramsay has written extensively on the avant-garde novelists Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the nature of their autobiographical writing.
[4] Returning to New Zealand from North America in 1994, Ramsay was Head of the School of European Languages and Literatures at University of Auckland from 2000 to 2004.
She expanded her focus to include Francophone languages of the Pacific, and published a translation of the poems of Kanak leader Déwé Gorodey, and other works on the cultural history of New Caledonia.
[5] Ramsay married veterinary surgeon and former All Black Michael O'Callaghan on 30 January 1971 in Poitiers, France.