Aldous Huxley having envisaged a brave new world, his second wife, Laura Huxley, tried to help the public deal with the old one. The author of several bestselling self-help books including You Are Not the Target: A Practical Manual of How to Cope with a World of Bewildering Change, she was an advocate of the “human potential” movement, the seed of New Age beliefs, well before self-improvement sections in bookshops, now swollen, even existed. In charitable work she strove to enrich the emotional lives of the young and old by uniting elderly people with babies.

Laura Archera was born in 1911 in Turin, Italy, the daughter of a stockbroker. She began playing the violin aged 10 and studied in Berlin, Paris and Rome, performing in front of the Queen of Italy aged 14. She made her solo American debut as a teenager with a performance of a Mozart concerto at Carnegie Hall and played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra from 1944 to 1947.

Motivated to make changes in her life by the death of a close friend from cancer, she gave away her violin and started producing documentary films and became an editor at the film company RKO. In 1948 she was told that a film she wanted to make about the Palio di Siena, the annual Italian horse race, would only go ahead if she could get Aldous Huxley to do the screenplay. She contacted him, then living in the desert outside Los Angeles, with some difficulty. Nothing became of the film but a strong friendship arose with both the author and his wife, Maria.

Maria died of breast cancer in 1955 and in 1956 Aldous asked Laura whether she had “ever been tempted by marriage” and whether “it might be amusing to travel to Yuma and get married at a drive-in chapel”. So began a union of seven years before Huxley's death in 1963, also of cancer, aged 69. During those years Laura was a co-experimenter in Aldous's voyages of discovery with mescalin and LSD, which he first started to experiment with after Maria's death. Laura criticised, however, the casual recreational use of psychedelic drugs that developed in the 1960s, stating that the hippies were taking “more LSD in a day than Aldous took in his lifetime”.

You Are Not the Target was published in 1963, offering what Huxley called “recipes for living and loving”. The book suggested mental and physical exercises (such as visualising your own funeral, standing on your head, picturing your favourite flower and dancing naked) designed to help one to cope with the stresses and uncertainties of modern life. The solution for what is now called road rage was tightening your stomach muscles: “It will reduce your waistline, increase circulation, liberate poison”.

The book was a hit, and was followed by other titles, such as One-a-Day Reason to be Happy, in which a freed dolphin teaches two children simple truths about dealing with the world with equanimity.

In the 1970s Huxley became the legal guardian of the two-year-old granddaughter of a close friend. Later asked why she had never had children herself, Huxley replied: “I never thought I was old enough to have one.” In 1977 she founded Our Ultimate Investment, a foundation dedicated to ”the nurturing of the possible human”. One of the foundation's projects was to set up “caressing rooms” where the elderly could go to hold infants, and where, she wrote, “the new and the old will meet and loneliness will dissolve”. The programme was scuppered by liability issues, but the charity, which also operates in the UK, has had success with projects offering life-skills classes to young teenagers and encouraging responsible parenthood.

Huxley devoted much of her life to preserving her late husband's writing and legacy, helping to ensure that his works remained in print. In 1968 she published a memoir, This Timeless Moment, a tender account in which she addresses criticisms of Aldous's perceived “cynical intellectualism”. Asked by an interviewer in 1992 what she had learnt by being with Aldous, she quoted what he had said before a conference hall of scientists hoping to know the conclusions of Huxley's investigations: “I'm very embarrassed because I worked for 40 years, I studied everything around, I did experiments, went to several countries, and all I can tell you is to be just a little kinder to each other.”

She is survived by Karen Pfeiffer, whom she brought up.

Laura Archera Huxley, self-help author and charity worker, was born November 2, 1911. She died of cancer on December 13, 2007, aged 96