Titus Awakes

rdf:langString Titus Awakes

rdf:langString Titus Awakes is the editorial title applied to a novel being planned by Mervyn Peake at the time he became too ill to write, about 1960. It was to have been the fourth novel in the Gormenghast series, after Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. Titus Awakes remains unfinished, as the author succumbed to illness in 1968 before the work could be completed. In the 1970s Peake's widow, Maeve Gilmore, wrote a version of Titus Awakes to which she gave the title Search Without End. It runs to 65,000 words, as counted on the typescript that she asked Peter Winnington to comment on. Watney told a slightly different tale. In 1992 Overlook Press, the American publishers of the Gormenghast series, printed at the end of Titus Alone the existing coherent portions of Mervyn Peake's Titus Awakes, with a brief introduction by John Watney. They consist of three pages from which it is clear that, although Titus has left Gormenghast, the castle remains active in his memory and important in the story. Although Peake wrote further passages, the editors were unable to decipher them.