The elementary center–focus problem is studied for a general separable planar analytic Rayleigh–Liénard system \(\begin{aligned} \frac{\textrm{d}x}{\textrm{d}t} = y,\quad \frac{\textrm{d}y}{\textrm{d}t} = -g(x) + f(x)\psi (y)y, \end{aligned}\) where g(x), f(x), and \(\psi (y)\) are analytic functions. By means of the Melnikov function method, a necessary and sufficient condition is obtained for the origin to be an elementary center: \(g'(0)>0\) and either \(\dfrac{xf\!\left( \phi ^{-1}(x)\right) }{g\!\left( \phi ^{-1}(x)\right) }\) or \(\psi (y)\) is an odd function in a neighborhood of the origin, where \(\phi (x)= \sqrt{2\!\int _0^x g(s)\, \textrm{d}s}\cdot \text {sgn}(x).\)