Despite high praise from the artist Edward Bawden and the poet Sir John Betjeman, the work of Jean Margaret Peace (1915–1989) remains almost totally unknown. Bawden considered her one of his most outstanding students while Betjeman described her writing as 'absolutely thrilling'.

Jean's other tutors at the Royal College of Art, where she studied from 1933 to 1936, included John Nash and Eric Ravilious, whose style clearly influenced her.

While at the RCA she experimented with pattern and print techniques.

Jean Peace experimented with pattern and print techniques at the RCA in 1936

Her painterly output, though, was frustratingly small, largely as a result of marriage, war and motherhood. To which must be added a highly self-critical nature.

After the Royal College, where Barbara Jones was a contemporary, Jean trained as a teacher at Goldsmiths College. She later taught briefly under the influential art educationalist Nan Youngman, before becoming a colleague of Peggy Angus.

But her career was cut short. In 1939, at the age of 24, Jean Lawson, as she then was, married David Peace (1915–2003) and, incredible as it now seems, she had to give up her job because of the 'marriage bar' which stipulated that women teachers had to be single. The war put a further brake on her artistic career.

Although the couple had both been peace activists, David, a trained architect, joined the RAF to build airfields while Jean soon became pregnant with their first child, Rachel. With her husband often absent, it was a lonely period with little time for art.

Jean and David Peace on their wedding day, September 1939

In 1946 they had a second child, Juliet, and a few years later the young family moved to Staffordshire, where David had found a job in the County Council's planning office.

Jean Peace holding her second daughter, Juliet, in March 1947

It was not until the children started school, around 1950, that Jean resumed painting after a gap of more than a decade. Given such a long period of artistic inactivity, she decided to renew contact with Bawden to ask his advice.

It was some 15 years since she'd last seen her former tutor. She describes the meeting in her diary. It was Friday the 13th, 1951.

'He was much older… and different in himself too. A successful man – a famous painter, a fashionable painter and he was a little malicious, a little bored, too clever – he enjoyed contradicting ones quite ordinary harmless remarks – taking you up on them. He looked silently through the paintings – at least that was the feeling I got. He did say some things – how frightful the paper was that I'd used. He said I should use handmade paper (agreed) but – so that I could scrape and cut and wash out as he does – which I don't particularly want to do – although he and Ravilious have made it fashionable… he liked the big ones best especially The Gravel Pits and Park in Snow – he was kind and simple and not too clever and said "go on as you are doing".'

This somewhat contradictory account seems to have set Jean back. In her mind, she accentuated the negatives, forgetting Bawden's final note of encouragement as well as his reputation for irascibility and being something of a tease.

Although she continued to paint over the next four or five years, producing some 40 watercolours, in her melancholy moments, the meeting with Bawden continued to haunt her.

A floral study with Irises and Foxglove by Jean Peace, 1951

'I feel bereaved,' she wrote, 'the light has gone out of my life – that's it. I felt my work, my painting was going to be important. I thought it showed promise and someone might notice this. Now there seems very little point in sweating my heart over it, if it is to be so dull that Bawden could scarcely say anything about it.'

Meanwhile, her husband, David, was starting to make a name for himself as a glass engraver. Although he continued his job in local government, he was receiving a steady stream of commissions. 'Planning provided a livelihood, but glass was my life,' he said.

In 1962 the family moved from Staffordshire to Cambridgeshire, settling in Hemingford Abbots near Huntingdon. David played a key role in preserving some of Cambridge's historic buildings, including Magdalene Bridge. He also made the acquaintance of Jim Ede, a former curator at the Tate, who had converted a row of derelict cottages in the city into an art gallery which doubled up as a home for him and his wife Helen.

Several of David's glass engravings entered the Kettle's Yard collection, including Sanctuary Lamp with its inscription 'Vere Dominus est in loco isto' (in truth God inhabits this place).

In December 1966, Jean, David and Rachel were invited for a tour of the collection, even though, as Jean's account of their visit explains, Jim Ede had forgotten they were coming. You can listen to Jean and David's granddaughter, Philippa Johnson, read out an extract from Jean's description of the visit on the Kettle's Yard Bloomberg Connects guide.

Everything was so precisely laid out that Jean had trouble imagining it as a home. In her diary, she describes 'round pebbles from the beach arranged in spirals on a low table, or arranged in a rush bowl in colours graded from rough white to dark rough grey. And it was all so perfect, so studied, so totally beautiful that it was perfectly painful. Agonisingly indigestible, I swallowed every one of those evenly round stones and they are still pulsating, palpating, down my tender tubes.'

The visit was not without mishap, however, as Jean stumbled over a Henri Gaudier-Brzeska sculpture, Bird Swallowing a Fish, which she had failed to spot artfully placed on the floor.

'Having tripped and fallen over this turbo-propped dolphin – who was after all lying heavily on an off-white rug which between us we churned up into quite a rough sea – I felt rather apprehensive about the next off-white carpet when I came to it. Looking down I felt my feet were getting caught in something else. "Objet trouvé" I said rather naughtily, and nobody noticed that it was a joke.'

Of the paintings, she particularly admired Vexilla Regis (The Standards of the King) by David Jones. 'The strange grey vision through the trees of Romans leaving Britain – wet and cold, great and windy and full of woods and secret altars'.

Partly because of deteriorating eyesight (which might explain the stumble), Jean had all but given up painting by the late 1950s and was concentrating on writing.

In the same year as the Kettle's Yard visit, she produced a book called Sweet Vernal, a series of essays published by Dent & Sons, describing countryside walks, mainly in Staffordshire, across a calendar year.

She also produced poems and short stories but her magnum opus is her diary which runs to more than 90 volumes. Betjeman, who had worked with her husband David on his Collins Guide to English Parish Churches, was bowled over by it. He contacted a publisher from Longmans, urging him to consider extracts for publication.

'I must say parts of it I found absolutely thrilling… this would be a most wonderful record of what life in a provincial town today is like. A sort of modern-day Flora Thompson… As to what she is like, she is a rather nice looking woman, with blue eyes, greying hair, fresh pink cheeks and boundless energy.'

Impressed though he was by the quality of Jean's writing, the publisher deemed Betjeman's suggestion impractical.

David, meanwhile, was going from strength to strength with his engraving. From the 1960s to his death in 2003, he produced more than 1,000 pieces, becoming President of the Guild of Glass Engravers and Master of the Art Workers' Guild. His work in Westminster Abbey includes lettering for the Betjeman memorial.

Grass study by Jean Peace in her sketchbook

Jean could not bear to part with her pictures. In her lifetime, she sold only two – for seven guineas each. The pair recently fetched well over £1,000 at auction, indicating, perhaps, a growing appreciation of her talent. She had more faith in her writing than her painting, keeping a diary until 1986, three years before she died.

In a moment of rare self-appreciation, she wrote, 'I think my writing has something unforgettable in it, that will last out many years of changing seasons.' If you have listened to her description of Kettle's Yard, I think you will agree.

James Trollope, writer

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This content was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies