Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage, and the Arts & Crafts Movement

This biography chronicles one woman's valiant life in a vanished era of emerging feminism and bold socialist thought.
C. R. Ashbee was, some would say, the key figure in the British Arts and Crafts movement around 1900. Regarded as heir to William Morris in political belief and design reform, Ashbee (and his Guild of Handicraft) gained international fame in his own time and remains a legend today. Although much has been written about him, to date there has been no full study of his remarkable wife.
This book reveals Janet Ashbee as a gifted woman of emotional warmth, strength, and unconventionality, qualities that enhanced her husband's work. But meeting the challenge of making a fruitful relationship and a practical marriage with C. R. Ashbee - predicated upon acceptance of his acknowledged and well-known homosexuality - represents one of the central themes of the book.

Felicity Ashbee is the author of scholarly articles on art history and nineteenth- and twentieth-century material culture. She is eighty-eight years old