Maeve Gilmore

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-06

Maeve Gilmore (June 14, 1917 – August 3, 1983) was a British painter, sculptor, and writer, born in Brixton, London. She was educated at St Leonards-Mayfield School from 1929 to 1934 and at a finishing school, Villa Beata, in Fribourg, Switzerland, where she studied French and German, before attending the Westminster School of Art, where she met her future husband, author and illustrator Mervyn Peake. Primarily known during her lifetime as a visual artist working in a modernist, avant-garde style, she exhibited in London galleries, though her public artistic career was significantly curtailed by the Second World War, marriage, and later her husband's protracted illness; she nonetheless continued painting, including murals in the family home. Following Peake's death in 1968, she wrote A World Away: A Memoir of Mervyn Peake (1970), an intimate account of their life together. Drawing on his notes and outlines, she also completed Titus Awakes: The Lost Book of Gormenghast, the fourth novel in his celebrated Gormenghast series, published in 2011 to critical acclaim decades after her own death. She also wrote and illustrated the children's book Captain Eustace and the Magic Room (1981), created with dolls. A retrospective exhibition of her visual art, her first institutional exhibition, was held at Studio Voltaire in 2022; The Guardian described her as 'a shrewd and loving observer of domestic life.'

Universe(s)

Books

• Titus Awakes (2011) · Gormenghast Expanded Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 3 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 1 (1 won)

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