Ivy Compton-Burnett
5 Braemar Mansions · novelist, and her companion Margaret Jourdain
Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote strange, brilliant novels told almost entirely in dialogue, in which genteel Victorian families quietly tear one another apart. For more than thirty years she lived at 5 Braemar Mansions, much of that time sharing the flat with the furniture historian Margaret Jourdain, her companion until Jourdain’s death in 1951.
The two women built a settled domestic life together at a time when such partnerships went unnamed in public. English Heritage’s blue plaque is on the building.