Margaret Jourdain (1876–1951)

Margaret Jourdain was born to a large family in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. Her father Francis Jourdain was a clergyman. Among her 10 siblings were the academic and educator Eleanor Jourdain, the ornithologist Francis Charles Robert Jourdain, and the mathematician Philip Jourdain. Margaret read classics at Oxford University, where she met Janette Ranken, who became a well-known actress. The pair moved to London and lived together until Janette left to marry Ernest Thesiger in 1917.
Margaret then became the lifelong companion of novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, who may have helped edit and hone her writing style. The couple lived together from 1918 until Jourdain's death in 1951. Margaret began her career ghost-writing under the pseudonym Francis Lenygon for the firm of Lenygon & Morant, furnishings dealers who were also the makers of carefully crafted reproductions. She worked with Ralph Edwards, keeper of Furniture and Woodwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to produce her series Georgian Cabinet-Makers (1944, 1951), biographies of the major London furniture-makers from the reign of Charles II to 1800. She conducted extensive archival research for the books, which became a new standard for the field of furniture and decoration. As revised by Edwards, the series went through several editions and remained the essential text for decades. Regency Furniture (1931) covered new ground in extending the classic period of English furniture design to 1830.