Lesley Lewis (art historian)

She was educated at home by governesses until the age of seventeen; she then spent a year in Paris at a finishing school run by the Ozanne family, where she became fluent in French.

[1][3] She gained BA and MA degrees in art history; "The Rise of Neo-Classic Architecture in England" was the title of her thesis, which was supervised by James Byam Shaw.

[1][2][3] During the Second World War, Lewis additionally worked as a clerk in her family's Lincoln's Inn law firm, as well as serving as a fire lookout.

[1][3] Lewis published a "pioneering article" in 1938 on 18th-century British antiquarians Nicholas Revett and James Stuart (nicknamed "Athenian"), who co-wrote The Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece.

[4] In 1944, she married Dr David James Lewis, a medical entomologist who researched the insect vectors of tropical diseases such as leishmaniasis and malaria.

[1][3] They moved to the Sudan, where he was posted; there Lesley Lewis worked at the Agricultural Research Institute at Wad Medani as librarian and clerk, studying law by correspondence course in her spare time.

[1][2] She was called to the Bar in 1956, becoming one of the earliest female members of Lincoln's Inn; although she did not practise, her legal training was important to her subsequent conservation work.

[1][3] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she researched materials in the London Public Record Office and the Vienna archives of the Holy Roman Empire relating to the Jacobite Court-in-Exile in 18th-century Rome of James Francis Edward Stuart, the so-called "Old Pretender", and British travellers on the Grand Tour.

The Sunday Times describes it as a "minor classic",[12] and a review of the first edition states "The charm of this book is that so many of the details of everyday life come alive and the more ordinary, prosaic things take on their true importance ... Reading it is rather like peering through the windows of a long-forgotten doll's house.