Venetia Newall was born in London in 1935, to an American father and English mother.
[2] In 1960, she observed peasant women selling elaborately decorated eggs at market stalls.
Newall became a collector of such eggs, and explored customs surrounding them in her extensive study, An Egg at Easter (1971), which won the American Folklore Society's Chicago Folklore Prize in its year of publication.
She was particularly noted for her networking skills, drawing in scholars from overseas to lecture at meetings of the Folklore Society.
[4] In the 1970s Newall became a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.