Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners

Summary (from the publisher): “What would Emily Post do?” Even today, Americans cite the author of the perennial bestseller Etiquette as a touchstone for proper behavior. But who was the woman behind the myth, the authority on good manners who has outlasted all comers? Award-winning author Laura Claridge presents the first authoritative biography of the unforgettable woman who changed the mindset of millions of Americans, an engaging book that sweeps from the Gilded Age to the 1960s.

Born shortly after the Civil War, Emily Post was a daughter of high society, the only child of an ambitious Baltimore architect, Bruce Price, and his wellborn wife. Within a few years of his daughter’s birth, Price moved his family to New York City, where they mingled with the Roosevelts and the Astors as well as with the new crowd in town – J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt clan. Blossoming into one of Manhattan’s most sought-after debutantes, Emily went on to marry Edwin Post, planning to re-create in her own home the happiness she’d observed between her parents. Instead, she would find herself in the middle of a scandalous divorce, its humiliating details splashed across the front pages of New York newspapers for months.

Traumatic though it was, the end of her marriage forced Emily Post to become her own person. She would spend the next fifteen years writing novels and attending high-powered literary events alongside the likes of Mark Twain and Edith Wharton, but in middle age she decided she would try something different.

When it debuted in 1922 with a tiny first print run, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest – and a country at its wildest. Claridge addresses the secret of Etiquette’s tremendous success and gives us a panoramic view of the culture from which Etiquette took its shape, as its author meticulously updated her book twice a decade to keep it consistent with America’s constantly changing social landscape.

A tireless advocate for middle-class and immigrant Americans, Emily Post became the emblem of a new kind of manners in which etiquette and ethics were forever entwined. Now, nearly fifty years after her death, we still feel her enormous influence on how we think Best Society should behave.

 

Review: Born in 1872, Emily Price Post was the only child of the prominent architect Bruce Price and his wife Josephine. Emily grew up in New York, friends with the Astors, Roosevelts, Morgans, and Vanderbilts. She became a sought-after debutante, before marrying Edwin Price when she was just eighteen. Emily adored her father her whole life and likely sought to replicate this relationship in her marriage, yet it was clear from the start that Emily and Edwin were ill-suited and he took to increasingly spending much of his time away from home. Although blessed with two sons, the couple eventually divorced. Yet her divorce, which she refused to talk about until her death, freed Emily from her role of wife to become a celebrated author and radio star, whose name is still synonymous with manners even today.

 

Emily was not the stern code-enforcing etiquette queen that many, even in her own lifetime, made her out to be. Indeed, she arrived at etiquette only after pursuing many of her other interests. Early on, she had a great love for acting and, following in her father's footsteps, architecture. She took great interest in personally designing her own clothes, which she then had made in Paris houses. She also delighted in keeping detailed accounts of her wardrobe, household, and activities and indeed had a "near compulsion to record the minutiae of her everyday life" (81). Before she was known for Etiquette, she was known for her best-selling fiction. In fact, her first novel was inspired by letters she had written home to her parents while traveling. Her mother bragged on how well written and vivid the letters were to a close family friend who was a published author, who helped introduce Emily to publishers.

 

Only after writing several novels did Emily begin work on Etiquette, for which she is chiefly remembered. Yet writing about social etiquette likely came easy to Emily, who had a keen interest in making her household and guests feel at ease. In 1901, a young house guest came to Emily for advice: "the girl had approached Emily in hopes that the older woman, whose taste she greatly admired and whose friendliness had encouraged her, would teach her society manners" (146). Emily delighted in helping the girl navigate the social scene, perhaps explaining the source of her early interest in helping to guide others. This dictate of always making others feel at ease and avoiding embarrassing others became the golden standard throughout her years of championing the cause of etiquette. Furthermore, she proved more than capable of changing with the times, substantially editing her rules every few years and stressing the need to be flexible. It was this book that made Emily Post famous and earned her book the honor of being "second only to the Bible as the book most often stolen from public libraries" (261).

 

Emily spent the rest of her life until her death in 1960 immersed in her work and spending time with friends and family. She was a well known radio host and wrote a daily advice column that at one point was distributed "to ninety-eight newspapers, with 5.5 million readers" (399). Her famous book never sold less than 30,000 copies a year in her lifetime. The little girl born to a privileged family in the wake of the Civil War ultimately proved adept at changing with the times, adapting to technology and changing social mores, and ultimately made a name for herself that is far more lasting even than her father's.

 

My one complaint with this book is that it feels vastly impersonal, likely due to Emily's close-lipped nature towards uncomfortable subjects and poor existing records. It details changes from one edition of her books to another yet has little insightful reflection on her marriage, on the type of illness that kept her from socializing for a brief time as a teenager, or on the cause of death of her beloved servant of many years. About the outbreak of World War II, the author states that Emily "had friends and relatives overseas, including in England" without any insight as to who these individuals might be. Similarly, other than a brief reference to his remarriage and the story of his death, little is said about Edwin Post after their divorce. Similarly, little personal detail is included about Emily's son Ned. This lack of personal detail that would have breathed life into Emily  and those around her kept her in the position of public figure rather than giving an intimate look at the woman herself. As a reader, I felt as if I was driving by Emily's house and reading about her in the newspaper without every getting a real inside look at her private life. However, as Emily did not keep a diary and rarely recorded or spoke of her darkest experiences, this biography likely represents the fullest picture we can have of the venerable Emily Price Post.

 

Stars: 3.5