Maeve Gilmore

Maeve Patricia Mary Theresa Gilmore (married name Peake; 14 June 1917 – 3 August 1983) was a British painter, sculptor and writer. Known primarily for her writing, a retrospective of Gilmore's artwork was held in 2022. The youngest of six siblings, Gilmore was the maternal granddaughter of the newspaper proprietor Henry Lascelles Carr. Raised at 49 Acre Lane in Brixton, the family later moved to Chelsea Square. The couple had three children, the artist and writer Sebastian Peake, the artist and poet Fabian Peake and the writer Clare Peake. However, the Second World War, marriage and Peake's illness curtailed her public artistic career. She continued to paint, including covering the walls and furniture of the family home in Drayton Gardens in Chelsea with murals. Her earlier works were portraits and still life, with her children as later subjects as her style became more abstract. These were documented in detailed photographs before the family sold the house after her death. However, when Peake became ill, she put her career on hold to care for him. Her memoir A World Away was written in the years immediately following Peake's death, and depicts their life together. On 3 August 1983, Gilmore died in London aged 66. On his death from dementia with Lewy bodies in November 1968, Peake left a few pages of notes for a fourth book, of which fewer than a thousand words are legible.

During the 1970s, Gilmore worked on the fourth Titus book herself, inspired partly by the list of people and places that Peake had imagined might feature in it. By 1980, she had completed a narrative she called Search Without End. It told the story of Titus backwards – not returning to Gormenghast, but to Sark where his creator Peake had lived in the early 1930s and again between 1946 and 1949, taking in along the way some of Peake's experiences (as a Parkinsonian patient in hospital, for example). In her final version, however, she avoided mentioning any name or event from the Titus books, with the exception of the name of the hero, so that her book could be read independently of her husband's work. She showed it to a few people, who did not encourage her to seek publication.

Early in 2010, Gilmore's children and grandchildren decided to publish it in time for the centenary of Mervyn Peake's birth in July 2011. Of the various versions, they preferred one that made direct reference to the Titus books, and arranged for the publisher, Vintage (in the UK; Overlook in the USA), to reprint Peake's notes as the first chapter. They called it by one of Peake's titles for his own novel, "Titus Awakes", subtitling it The Lost Book of Gormenghast.

Reviewing Titus Awakes, Michael Moorcock declared it "a fascinating, intensely personal homage", saying that Gilmore "successfully echoes the music of the originals, if not the eloquent precision of Peake's baroque style as she sends Titus on his adventure."

Posthumous re-discovery Some of her work was exhibited at the Ancient & Modern gallery, London in 2014.

In 2022 a retrospective exhibition of her art was held at Studio Voltaire in Clapham, south London, which called it her first institutional exhibition, and situated her alongside contemporaries such as Vanessa Bell and Winifred Knights, and Surrealists Leonora Carrington, Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun. It was reviewed in Apollo and by Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. The Guardian called her "a shrewd and loving observer of domestic life" who "belongs in the company of women who deserve respect for their artistry, not pity for their disadvantages." Her story was featured on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour