Margaret Jourdain (15 August 1876 – 6 April 1951) was a prominent writer on English furniture and decoration.
She began her career ghost-writing as Francis Lenygon for the firm of Lenygon & Morant, dealers in furnishings with a royal appointment, who were also the fabricators of carefully crafted reproductions, especially of Kentian furnishings, some of which have been displayed in public collections for decades.
[1] Jourdain attended the University of Oxford where she studied classics obtaining a third-class degree.
[2] The finely honed writing that distinguishes Jourdain's work must be partly credited to careful pre-editing by her lifelong friend and domestic partner, the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett.
With Ralph Edwards, Keeper of Furniture and Woodwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum, she co-wrote Georgian Cabinet-Makers (1944, 1951), a series of biographies of the major furniture-makers of England from the Restoration of Charles II to 1800.