Family Linen

"Brilliant, haunting, dark, joyous, remarkably compelling...immensely difficult to put down...a master storyteller." THE VILLAGE VOICE A childhood memory re-experienced, a funeral that brings about a family reunion, and the excavation of a swimming pool on the site of an old well, uncover family secrets and air the dirty linen in this behind-the-scenes look at life and family, memory and forgetfulness, anger and forgiveness in a small Southern town. "Falls in line with the best of classical Southern fiction...but Ms. Smith's vision is her own and places her among the best of contemporary Southern writers." THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION

"This book provides an illustrated commentary on the major linen families and the magnificent houses they lived in along the Bann Valley in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries."--BOOK JACKET.

The domestic linen industry left an indelible imprint on Ulster history. It was introduced by colonists from the north of England in the 17th century, before the arrival of the Huguenots, and encouraged by the landlords to improve their rentals. Earnings from raising flax, spinning yarn and weaving cloth, provided farming families with regular incomes that enabled them to lease small farms and improve marginal land. Continual improvements by Ulster bleachers in the finishing of linens secured for them control of the industry, focussing its development. Exports to Britain first through Dublin and then direct to Liverpool and London, created a merchant class and underpinned the development of Belfast and the provincial market towns. By 1800 Ulster was reckoned to be the most prosperous province in Ireland. It was also the most densely peopled with a population of two million in 1821, almost equal to that of Scotland.