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

By Laura Claridge

“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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 14, 2008
• ISBN: 9781588367556

Laura Claridge

Laura Claridge’s books include Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence; Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of America; and Norman Rockwell: A Life. A frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and other publications, she lives in the Hudson Valley.

Reviews for Emily Post

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An intriguing look into a life and an age, spanning from the end of the American Civil War to the end of World War I, and the changing society therein.

[cat1ballou · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I learned that Emily Post was only human. I'm not sure how I feel about this sudden lack of pedestal.

[janisdoll · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was excited to get this book because I was interested in reading about this iconic woman. Unfortunately, I don't think this book ever gets to be a readable story of a life. I can't say for sure, because I have never been able to get very far before dozing off. I give the author 5 stars for the incredible research that was done, and even 5 stars for the intense writing. but this book gets only 1 star on the readability scale.from my point of view. I never felt that I got to "know" the woman, but was confronted with an encyclopedia of facts (not always chronological) and citations and references that ultimately spoil the reading experience. This book is great as a reference book, but not a very good biography for the layperson.

[kellswitch_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book immensely. The writing style is easy, accessible and very enjoyable.The author seamlessly interweaves the life and history of Emily Post with the people and times of her life, giving a full portrait of what it was like to live in the "Gilded Age" and how a personality such as Emily Post was created.My only real criticism is that the last few chapters felt more like listing the changes she made in her book, and her professional appearances rather than actually discussing her life. That got a little tiresome after a bit.But over all an excellent book that I would recommend to anyone who has an interest in either her or the time she lived in.And wow did that lady see lots of changes.

[lschwoob_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have to honestly say I probably would have never read this book if I had not found it on Library Thing. I often wondered how Emily Post became an expert on etiquette and after reading Laura Claridge's well-written biography I now know. I would recommend this book to anyone who is curious about Emily Post and the life that she led. I was surprised that I enjoyed the book so much.

[lesphillips · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While I agree with comments made by a few other readers about the unevenness of the editing, I found the author's enthusiasm for her subject compelling. As the author mentions in the introduction, she was surprised that no one had written a biography on Emily Post before this: a rear biographer's find. I started the book in August and just finished it in November. This is not a fault of the book but the result of my very busy life and my slightly ADD personality. A tribute to the book is that I kept returning to it and eventually finished it. I found the detailed social and cultural history of the periods that Ms Post lived through enlightening and added another layer to my understanding of those times. Yes, the editing is not the best and sometimes the flow is a bit disorganized. Yet, it is a fun read and relevant to our times.

[gpsman_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ms. Claridge writes how the world's maven of manners led a complex life that surely informed much of her work.This book was very detailed and at times difficult to continue for that reason. The number of characters could be overwhelming. there is much detail and lots of information.

[csmcmahon_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I really wanted to like this book. I love historical biographies but I just found this book simply impossible to finish. I abandoned it after reading about 1/3 of the book. The authored thoroughly researched Ms. Post's life but I found myself confused at times keeping track of the individuals and the all details. At times I felt like Claridge was simply doing a dump of the research. Some of the details didn't seem important to the telling of the story. There was a lot of skipping around in the timeline telling the story.

[kurvanas · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book. Truly brings the woman to life, rather than merely listing important dates and facts. Claridge does an excellent job inhabiting her subject's world and life. She also has a wonderful, poetic writing style which is a joy to read on its own. Recommended biography.

[misselliot · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a fairly exhaustive biography of Emily Post, perhaps more than I really needed. It took me a while to get through the book, although I appreciated the short chapters.The author is definitely fond of her subject, as indicated by her criticism of journalists who criticized Ms. Post or gave her primary publication "Etiquette" a poor review.I found the descriptions of Ms. Post's teens and twenties to be the most interesting, as they provide a glimpse of upper crust life at the turn of the 20th century. Through her, we see what "normal" life was like for the upper class. Although the author touches on some issues of class and race, we never really see a good comparison between Mr. Post's life and the life of the average New Yorker at the time. Admittedly the book is already too long, and these details might not make a good addition.

[kittentheverb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I only had a passing interest in Emily Post when I picked this up, so I didn't have a lot of interest in the minutiae of her ancestry. This was sometimes a problem...the first half of the book falls into a pretty typical trap of biography--too much tangential information, not enough trimming, not enough focus for the subject. There's plenty here of interest, but Claridge does a middling job of sifting you through it. If you're comfortable with a meandering read, start at the beginning, but if you're more interested in what made Emily Post the icon she became, start at the second half.

[samantha464 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting look at the story behind the Mistress of Manners, it certainly broadened my view of this iconic figure. On one hand, I now appreciate Emily Post as something of an egalitarian, not a label I would have previously affixed to her. On the other hand, certain of her ideals, as narrated by Claridge, did rub me the wrong way.But my reaction to the story of Emily Post aside, I was left underwhelmed by the book itself. It started off strong, delving deeply into Emily Post's early life and marriage. The subject of her divorce was treated respectfully, but given its proper place in the text. However, as the book progressed, I felt like it was filled more and more with tiresome details, and redundant statements. It was an exhaustive study of an interesting and often overlooked, in this day and age, figure of American society. Though the long life of the subject warrants a long book, it could perhaps have been cut down by fifty or more pages in an effort to make it more readable. Still, Claridge provided an interesting and, I think valuable study of Mrs. Post's life, work, and most of all, influence on the development of modern America.

[lbrary · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had hard time getting through this biography. Most of Emily Post's early life seemed very dull to me. She only becomes an interesting person after her divorce, as she tries out different ways to define her own life. But it takes half the book to get there. Things finally pick up after Etiquette is written, and Emily proves to be more adaptable and interested in the world outside her own class than I would have expected. The story of how Emily revised her guide to being part of the "Best Society" to fit the rapid social changes of the first half of the 20th century was both surprising and enjoyable.Overall the writing was uneven and jumped around too much in focus. A good biography needs to put its subject in context. But Claridge's attempts to supply this context tended to interrupt the flow of the main story rather than illuminate it. The writing was also very repetitious, especially when covering Emily's early life, as if the author herself found the story too uninteresting to find new ways to describe it.

[sigmundfraud · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love social history. this biography of Emily Post, the Queen of Etiquette gives the reader a colorful feel for life among the upper crust from the late 19th century to well into the 20th century. I thought who cares about social etiquette in 21st America but this book makes it dazzling. It is worth a detour.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Emily Post is a biography laden with details - chock full of history and background. Reading it was like wallowing in words, almost too many words. At times I got bogged down by the excessive descriptive narrative while other times it helped explain Emily's reactions to the lap of luxury world around her. This biography is not limited to Emily's life but extends, in detail, to the people around her. What is important to note is Claridge's exhaustive research into not only the history of Emily's era, but the political and cultural climate of her time thus drawing a complete and compelling picture of Emily Post beyond etiquette.

[emily_morine · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was an eerily good fit for a personal study of biographies I'm doing, so I was thrilled to get a copy through the Early Reviewers program. I found it to be an engaging, well-written study that strikes a good balance between specific detail about its subject, and contextual detail about the social and national milieu in which she moved. I also found the subject, Emily Post, to be a surprisingly sympathetic character - not that I expected to dislike her, but I was impressed at the degree to which I related to her. Her appreciation for the small details of daily life is something I share in spades, and her concern with using etiquette to ease the way for other people, rather than to shame them, is admirable. Especially fascinating to me is Claridge's examination of the revisions to *Etiquette* over the span of almost forty years, and how the revision process changed Emily Post herself. Born to extreme privilege in New York City, a debutante during the Gilded Age, Post wrote the original 1922 edition of *Etiquette* with people like herself in mind. After its publication and success, she was inundated with letters from a wide cross-section of the American population, including recent immigrants, working- and middle-class readers, all wanting to know her advice on issues she had originally not thought to include: how to throw a dinner party if one hasn't any servants, for example, or how courtship conduct is changed for women who have joined the workforce. With successive revisions, Post adapted *Etiquette* to suit her changing understanding of her audience, as well as the changing mores of the times. Claridge knows that she's up against a popular idea of Emily Post as a petty, hard-nosed bluestocking, dispensing Thou Shalt Not's from on high, and she presents a strong case that this is a huge misconception. From the beginning, Post prioritized manners as a tool for kindness, ease and compassion, rather than an end in itself. She always insisted that telling people which fork to use held no interest whatsoever for her. But what is most striking to me is the way in which her book, which became the go-to reference on conduct for so many people, actually widened her own experience so drastically by bringing her into contact with a diversity of Americans outside her normal social sphere. The mutual process of change and adaptation is intriguing, and Claridge does a good job of tracing the differences in successive incarnations of *Etiquette*, as well as the changes in Emily Post herself.Also surprising is Emily Post’s determined sympathy with the freer manners and customs that emerged in the early twentieth century. Claridge writes at length about the long-term affects on Post of her ill-advised marriage and scandalous divorce, and goes on to examine how those experiences affected her attitudes toward courtship and marriage in general. Her own marriage deteriorated because she and her husband were not allowed to *know* each other in any significant way prior to their wedding, to build sympathy or trust. Understandably, then, she became embittered against overly strict conventions around courtship and “protecting the innocence” of young ladies – an innocence which would come crashing around their ears immediately upon marriage. She was thrilled when social customs began to loosen, in the 1910’s and 20’s, and implored modern parents to let their children spend time together unchaperoned, even if doing so seemed improper or scandalous by the rules of their own upbringing. Much to Emily Post’s own satisfaction, her chapters on chaperonage in *Etiquette* began with detailing the necessity of a chaperone, and progressed to treating this as a “vanished custom.” Not one to cling to the old ways for their own sake, Post is portrayed as a flexible, engaged member of her own culture, who created a chronicle of changing social expectations over half a century. Claridge’s portrait is fascinating and readable, and introduced me to a formidable figure of the early twentieth century, whose importance I had never before stopped to consider.

[jemsw_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When I mentioned to my step-mother that I was reading a biography of Emily Post, she asked me whether Post had ever done anything "except be proper all the time." Her question strikes at the heart of a fundamental misconception about Post, one that haunted her in her own time and persists into our own.Post, as detailed in Laura Claridge's well-researched and documented biography, never set out to become either the model or the arbiter of propriety. Rather, her aim was to make etiquette into something more expansive, something that had far more to do with kindness and righteous living than with enforcing particular standards of propriety. She was, in a very meaningful sense, as much of an ethicist as an etiquette expert, and her ongoing commitment to updating her monumental handbook on etiquette demonstrated her passionate commitment to performing a useful service to her society rather than restricting it with needless rules and conventions.But even beyond this distinction, Post emerges as a subject due for a meaningful biographical treatment. Claridge lays the groundwork of the world that was to shape Post with exquisite care, outlining not only the positions of Post's family on both sides, but also giving a fair picture of the social circles in which they moved, the kind of money that made their lives possible, and the professional achievements of Post's father, the noted architect Bruce Price.Post emerges as a woman who was both very much a part of her age and also very out of place in it, unhappy in her marriage and in the exhausting demands that society placed upon her. Instead, despite her hesitation at defining herself professionally, it becomes very clear that Post was someone who turned almost entirely to her work to shape her self-image. Post worked professionally as a novelist, cultural critic, house designer, and (most famously) etiquette expert, and it is clear that she was equally meticulous and driven in her approach to each form of work as she tried to find a way to make her mark on the world.Claridge's missteps are few. She spends a great deal of time emphasizing the women's suffrage movement and then passes by the historic enfranchisement of women almost without comment. This is a repeated mistake where the anticipated overtakes the actual and leaves the reader feeling temporally unsettled. Secondly, too many pages are spent in Post's waning years, which were chiefly spent in performing minor revisions and, as Claridge plainly shows, suffering the brunt of American ageism. But these problems are minor compared to the achievement that this biography represents, for it really seems to mimic something like the sweep of Post's own life, which stretched from Reconstruction to the election of President Kennedy, Claridge follows in the nearly blameless footsteps of her subject, who stretched out her welcoming hands to younger generations even while tactfully ignoring the institutional racism and sexism that riddled the country. That's not meant as a criticism. This is the biography of Emily Post—other biographies will tell of other Americas. This is a biography that tells of one extraordinarily determined and bright woman's America. It is a biography that you may give to your grandmother without offense, and yet its thorough social history and unflinching commitment to truth makes it suitable for the most rigorous and critical mind.

[ganeshaka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a monumental book, and not a quick read. Be prepared to work a bit.Emily Post's life spanned a period that began with the rapid growth of the United States after the Civil War and ended with the Kennedy era. She engaged fully the enormous changes that occurred in American society over that span, first as a debutante, then as a divorcee, a novelist, a mentor on manners, and finally as a radio personality and icon to millions.What makes this a challenging work is the way in which her life was so intimately intertwined with social and cultural growth of the nation. There's a lot to take in. Her family life alone was rich enough in detail and drama for a compelling biography. She emerged - through grit and talent - from a sensational society divorce to achieve a successful career as a novelist.To appreciate her career as a the author of Etiquette means contemplating how the American lifestyle absorbed the impacts of immigration, wars, and technology. Emily, through reader feedback, kept her finger on the American pulse. She eventually revised her Etiquette ten times. It was relevant, once, to chaperones. It stayed relevant, as women gained independence, for flappers and then bobby-soxers.My advice is to approach this biography as you would a three credit course in American History. Be prepared to take some time to allow the information to sink in. If you take too much in at a time, it can become a bit dry or overwhelming. You might even try going off on a tangent - both Etiquette or The Title Market are available on Project Gutenberg. In the final analysis, Emily Post was an impressive person, had a grand life, and merits the time spent in reading this book.

[bookbully · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My Southern heritage rejoiced this past weekend when I noticed a small piece in the "Business" section of the Sunday New York Times: the great-great granddaughter of Emily Post now has an "Etiquette" website. Ah, to think that civility could become the new Blackberry. If Emily Post had anything to do with it, we'd all continue to practice common courtesy even in the age of immediate gratification. A new biography of her simply entitled, "Emily Post," details the amazing life of a woman who was born in the Gilded Age and died on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius. Laura Claridge takes what could have been dry material and fashions a fascinating tale of old money versus new; fidelity versus adultery; and the rise of one woman in an age where voting rights were still the privelege of white men.Emily Post was raised among wealth and married more of the same. But she possessed a keen mind that, if she'd been born a century later, probably would have propelled her into an architecture program. As it was, her interest in her father's profession and a knack for writing twisted and turned until they wound up giving birth to a little blue book called "Etiquette." And the rest, as they say, is history.The early part of Post's life is the most interesting and compelling. Claridge details the life of a bright little girl, her debut into society, and subsequent marriage to a handsome bounder. Years later Post survived an embarrassingly public divorce but went on to establish herself as a name brand.The latter part of the book may not be as scintillating but it does make one pause in spots. Especially as we learn that the woman to the manor born evolved into someone who liked nothing better than a good meatloaf and a bowl of chocolate ice cream. Followed by elbows ON the table.

[pensivecat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My idea of Emily Post had in the past been of a stiff, exacting, grey woman, who shouts "elbows off the table!" when you thought you could relax. (I guess it's been a while since I actually peered into her books). Laura Claridge's biography of the etiquette expert set me straight. Through this book I was taken through the charmed life of the daughter of a hard-working architect (and throughout the telling of his story I found myself saying out loud: he designed THAT? wow), and into a world where breeding was everything, and new money was tolerated condescendingly. I wondered how a girl surrounded by calling cards and debutante balls would become the "mistress of manners" for the everyday reader.Though it is true that Emily Post never had to experience poverty first hand, her life certainly did go through changes that took massive adjustments in her life, all of which she faced with grace. A public and embarrassing divorce was the turning point. Emily Post started to focus on writing, thus becoming a career woman of sorts. Though her novels were only moderately successful, she showed an ability to adapt to a modernizing society, with its breakdown of class and rigid Victorian structures. With an industriousness learned from her father, along with a combination of a Southern and New York upbringing, she eventually reinvented herself as the most well-known etiquette writer to this day; an architect of manners.Claridge's writing was well paced and enjoyable. She seemed to be pleased with her subject, while neither gushing about her abilities or harping on her faults. Altogether, it's well balanced. I also found it pleasantly informative about one of the most intriguing time periods in American history. A welcome subject for a life story, I am both glad it was written and surprised at the dearth of biographies about such an important woman of the past century.

[newsieq · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With an architect father, socialite mother and coal baron grandfather, Emily Price Post grew up in a cocoon of privilege. When mores of the Gilded Age – and her social class – all but forbade college and a professional career, she blazed a trail. First a novelist, she eventually became the Miss Manners of her generation (or, more accurately, Miss Manners the Emily Post of hers) and one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.Rich with description of the milieu into which Mrs. Post was born in 1872 and detail of the personal and historical events that shaped her character and worldview, Emily Post tells a fascinating tale of a woman and her times. The author’s writing is straightforward and yet warm – much like her subject. Although I intended to read the book in short bursts, I quickly found myself in can’t-put-it-down mode, finishing its 400+ pages in just two days.The last biography I enjoyed as much as I did Emily Post was Katharine Graham’s Personal History, which won a Pulitzer Prize for autobiography in 1998. I prefer to read non-fiction uninterrupted by footnotes, which I find distracting. Hooray for Laura Claridge for writing without them! Instead, sources are cited in back notes keyed to page numbers – plus the book comes with an index. Emily Post is an altogether satisfying read, laced with wonderful, occasionally gossipy anecdotes that might have been found in People magazine had it been published in Mrs. Post’s day. Not that Emily Post is lightweight fare – the book will definitely appeal to readers who like a bit of “heft” to their non-fiction. I plan to suggest this book for my non-fiction reading group – I think it will appeal to all 20 or so members. I’m a genealogist, so I hoped to find a family tree and photos. I read an advanced copy with neither, but both may be included in the final publication. (I made my own Emily Post family tree, which I referred to quite often.)