Maeve Gilmore

Maeve Gilmore (1917-1983) was a British artist and writer born in Brixton, London, who trained at the Westminster School of Art. There she met novelist and illustrator Mervyn Peake, whom she married in 1937; they had three children. Her own painting and sculpture career was curtailed by the Second World War, marriage, and caregiving, though she continued to paint and decorated her Chelsea home with murals. After Peake's death in 1968, she wrote A World Away, a memoir of their life together, and later completed Titus Awakes, a fourth novel in his Gormenghast sequence assembled from his notes and published posthumously in 2011 as an intensely personal homage to her husband's work. She also wrote the children's book Captain Eustace and the Magic Room. A 2022 retrospective at London's Studio Voltaire reassessed her own artistic legacy.