When Emily Post's Etiquette was published in 1922,
reviewers already considered it hopelessly behind the times, yet its gentle
instruction, the product of a 50-year-old grandmother, continues to find a huge
audience. In Emily Post: Daughter Of The Gilded Age, Mistress Of American
Manners—the
first major biography of Post—Laura Claridge argues that Post acted as a
sociocultural bridge, adapting the lessons of her upbringing—in which
genteel New York was forced to accept "new money" names into high
society—to the Jazz Age and beyond.
Post crafted her persona in the wake of her
success to make it seem accidental, but she never spoke about the incident in
her life when she might have found the world most unmannered. The daughter of
an architect and a coal heiress from Baltimore, Emily Price married young to
banker Edwin Post, an aggressive social climber whose nights out on the town
resulted in a blackmailing attempt by publisher William D'Alton Mann over an
affair in 1905. Rather than quietly paying Mann off, Edwin decided to fight
him, bringing justice to the class he targeted, at the cost of splashing the
lurid details of the Posts' marriage over the tabloids. Claridge finds no
evidence that Edwin consulted Emily before deciding to take this route—a
breach of etiquette that humiliated the faithful, guileless wife and led to her
marriage's dissolution.
In Claridge's view, Post "had needs that a Gilded
Age society marriage could not accommodate"; though she never wanted it, the
divorce, itself a modern invention, freed her to develop herself in a way her
conventional upbringing would never have warranted. She never considered
herself a feminist, but Post's crafting of her own career, from her early days
writing Edith Wharton-esque society novels to her later mastery of endorsement
deals and radio spots, shows she was remarkably adaptive to the changing times
which enabled her to essentially market her upbringing. Claridge alternates
between novelistic depictions of watershed moments in Post's life and deft
scene-setting placing her in her upper-class milieu, but her biggest asset is
Post's own words from her many media appearances after Etiquette's success. While she may
have wanted to depict her own success as accidental, she built her reputation
for expertise as assiduously as her father picked up architectural commissions,
and the context Claridge brings to her public image bolsters her case for Post
as a woman who thrived amid the complications of modernity even as, for many
readers, she embodied the establishment.