Coming Sunday in The Sun: Emily Post
This Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, Anne E. Carroll reviews Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners by Laura Claridge (Random House / 525 pages / $30). Here's an excerpt from her review:
As a young woman, Emily Post experienced the pros and cons of media attention. On the one hand, the society pages lovingly detailed her attendance at dinners and dances. But on the other, when her husband was caught in an extramarital affair, that, too, was in the news — including on the front page of her hometown paper, The Baltimore Sun. This is just one of the complex realities of Post’s life recounted in Claridge’s new biography, the first of its kind about the woman who would set the standards for etiquette. ...
Claridge shows her to be a positive and provocative role model for today’s women, given that she struggled with the same questions of purpose — and of balancing her career and her family — that still trouble us. ... [Claridge] offers a rich description of the social developments of the times, arguing that understanding American culture offers a way to understand Post’s mind and the expectations placed upon her.
The reverse also is true: Post’s achievements and writing offer a window through which we can better understand the changes that took place during the decades of her life. Through Post’s eyes — and particularly through her efforts to keep current with social trends so that she could revise Etiquette accordingly — we learn about the Gilded Age, the early 20th century and later developments, particularly changing gender roles and expectations for women. ...
Post’s early impression of etiquette as being only about such mundane questions as which fork to use when at formal dinners made her initially reluctant to write about it. She warmed to the subject only as she came to understand it not as a series of rigid rules governing behavior but as a dynamic system that, if mastered, could allow its practitioners to rise in society. To her, then, it was a subject with profoundly democratic implications.
This book is not an easy or a light read; it includes 445 pages of text, nearly 40 pages of notes and an extensive bibliography. It’s an immensely researched work that straddles the line between academic and popular nonfiction. But readers will find themselves rewarded with fascinating insights into the times through which Emily Post guided us.
