Titus Awakes
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Titus Awakes is an early working title applied to a novel planned by Mervyn Peake about 1960, before he became too ill to write. It was to have been the fourth novel in the Gormenghast series, after Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone.
Peake's own version of Titus Awakes is unfinished, as the author died in 1968 without doing any more than starting it.[1] But his widow, Maeve Gilmore, attempted to complete it, and produced two different versions of her interpretation. A reduced version was seen by a reviewer in the 1970s,[2] and what is believed to be her earlier manuscript and notes were edited and published in 2010.[3] So the fourth book exists in three different forms: a few pages of preliminary fragments published in 1992,[4] a never-published manuscript by Gilmore from the 1970s,[2] and an apparently earlier version of Gilmore's book found by her family, edited and published in 2010.[3]
In the 1970s Peake's widow, Maeve Gilmore, wrote a modified version of Titus Awakes to which she gave the title Search Without End. It runs to 65,000 words, in the typescript that she asked G.P. Winnington to comment on.[2] Watney edited[1] Peake's early fragments as an appendix to Titus Alone (Peake 1992).[4]
In 1992 Overlook Press, the American publishers of the Gormenghast series, printed at the end of Titus Alone the few coherent portions of Mervyn Peake's Titus Awakes, with a brief introduction by John Watney.[1] They consist of three pages from which it is clear that although Titus has left the castle, Gormenghast remains active in his memory and important in the story. Although Peake wrote further passages, editors were unable to decipher them.[4]
