Especially through two books she wrote in later life, the artist, designer and teacher Felicity Ashbee, who has died aged 95, upheld the memories of her remarkable family - and kept alive a link with the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and its leading influence, William Morris. Her work was also crucial in reviving interest in the Guild of Handicraft, a radical cooperative experiment in which craftsmen, emulating the workshops of medieval England, would produce handmade goods and pass on their skills to young apprentices.
The guild was launched in 1888 in Whitechapel, in the deprived East End of London, by Felicity's father, the architect CR (Charles Robert) Ashbee, a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement. The project, inspired partly by Morris's ideas and partly by Ashbee's own sublimated homosexuality - his pleasure in working among young men - was successful in London, and was soon copied by other workshops around England; at its height it employed more than 50 craft workers, including cabinetmakers, metalworkers, silversmiths, jewellers, enamellers, blacksmiths and printers. But after it moved to Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds, in 1902, it fell foul of competition from mass-produced goods and went into liquidation in 1907.
At the height of the guild's success, in 1898, Felicity's father married Janet Forbes. Felicity had other remarkable relatives - her grandfather, Henry Spencer Ashbee, was a celebrated bibliophile, and her great-uncle, William Carrick, a pioneer of photography in 19th-century Russia.
Janet herself lived a private life with no claims to historical eminence, but Felicity's biography of her mother, Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage and the Arts and Crafts Movement, published in 2001 when its author was 88, revealed, among other things, an open and honest account of the way her father and mother negotiated their lives. Earlier this year, on her 95th birthday, Felicity published the autobiographical Child in Jerusalem, a vivid account of the childhood she spent in the Holy City after the collapse of the Guild of Handicraft in Gloucestershire.
Felicity was born in Broad Campden, a hamlet about a mile from Chipping Campden, one of her parents' four daughters (the others were Mary, Helen and Pru), at a time when her father's career seemed to have lost direction. In the growing Ashbee family, it was the witty and emphatic Janet who was the greater presence. After the guild had come to an end, they lived on at Broad Campden until Felicity was six, before moving to Jerusalem, where "CRA", as he was known, was employed from 1918 to 1922 as a conservationist and town planner.
Felicity's book about the period recalls the smells, the noise, the other children, the stone burning the backs of her legs when she sat down - all details that speak for her happiness at that time.
Returning to England in 1923, the Ashbee girls were sent to various genteel schools in Kent, which completely failed to meet Felicity's needs. The most intellectual of the four, she was treated by her father as the son he never had, though she was not given a boy's educational chances. From 1932 to 1936, she trained as a painter at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, and began a career as a teacher and designer. She joined the Communist party, and her leftwing sympathies can be seen in the posters she designed to raise money for famine relief during the Spanish civil war.
At the outbreak of the second world war, she joined the WAAF and was sent to the codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. Indeed, it was Felicity who logged the bleep-bleep of Rudolf Hess's plane as it crossed the North Sea in May 1941 en route to Scotland on the supposed peace mission being undertaken by Hitler's deputy. She had, as they say, a good war, and directed memorable amateur theatricals at various military camps.
After 1945 she worked briefly with her sister Helen in Manchester, designing textiles, and then settled in London, where she taught art at various schools, though mainly at Queen's Gate school, Kensington. She called her pupils "poor little rich girls", but many of them looked back fondly on her charismatic teaching.
Although she spent some years in psychotherapy in the 1950s, somehow Felicity's emotional instabilities seem to have been the key to much that was precious about her - her outgoing spirit and her engagement with the young. She was single, young in spirit, open to the world, and obstinately and deeply liberal in her ideas.
For the last 45 years of her life she lived in the same house in Notting Hill. She was active in the local community association at Meanwhile Gardens, though her sense of things seemed to be poised somewhere between the public and the private. She did not always respond to personal and domestic matters until she could see them as an issue, and, on the other hand, she felt the news and politics very personally. She would cut up her copy of the Guardian to send to friends, as if it were part of a three-cornered conversation. Talking to her, one came to recognise that the long-drawn-out "No-o-o-o-o", or "We-e-e-l-l" was Felicity giving notice that the conversation was about to change from private fact to public issues.
One of her great satisfactions in later years was to see the historical reputation of her father and other members of her family growing. First there was The Simple Life (1981), Fiona MacCarthy's wry and smiling account of CR Ashbee's workshop in the Cotswolds. Then there was my own life-and-works study, CR Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist (1985). Ian Gibson wrote about her grandfather, Henry Spencer Ashbee, bibliophile and collector of pornography, in The Erotomaniac (2001), and Felicity herself wrote about the photographer William Carrick.
As keeper of the family's memories, she was always ready to help scholars and researchers, who often turned into friends.
· Jane Felicity Ashbee, artist, designer and writer, born February 22 1913; died July 26 2008
