Emily Post by Laura Claridge

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

Laura Claridge

Random House, 2008

“Before you can hope to become even a passable guest,” Emily Post wrote in her eruptively readable 1922 classic Etiquette, “let alone a perfect one, you must learn as it were not to notice if hot soup is poured down your back. If you neither understand nor care for dogs or children, and both insist in climbing all over you, you must seemingly like it.” It was a revelation – not so much for the proscriptive guide to behavior itself (Laura Claridge, in her stunning and unprecedented new biography of Post, points out that mongrel Americans have always been hungry consumers of behavioral guides) but for the sharp and witty confidence of its prose. It poured from the book in a cold and utterly refreshing stream.

Etiquette was written as the “roaring ‘20s” were igniting and the need seemed greater than ever for a guide to proper and gracious behavior. Fashionable young partygoers are reminded that it is not considered “smart to be late,” and newly-liberated young women are warned that too much freedom can be a bad thing. Likewise Claridge’s Emily Post is fortuitous in its timing, not only because there’s never been an actual biography of her subject before, but also because the 2000-aughts have spawned a culture at least as rife with uncontrolled freedoms as the ‘20s. It’s good to be reminded that somebody like Emily Post ever existed, and Claridge does this with skill and the historian’s ear for contextualization:

In the middle of the decade, Emily was writing the rules of proper behavior for a population whose first lady wore flapper clothes so effectively that the couturier Charles Worth awarded her a French locket on behalf of the garment industry. In her personal shape, unlike the increasingly plump author, Grace Coolidge, with her slender, athletic body and her interest in sports, captured the epoch perfectly. Rumor had it that female skiers were even training to compete in the next Olympic games.

In her great book and its many subsequent revised editions, Emily Post coached nearly a century of Americans on how to comport themselves and think well of their neighbors. She did more than any other individual to try to civilize the country, surely a worthy goal. In Claridge’s wonderful new book, she is at last given the worthy biography she’s always deserved.