'Emily Post'
BOOK REVIEW
A biography of the matron of manners focuses on the woman, not the rules.
AS WITH her last book, a biography of Norman Rockwell, Laura Claridge has revisited an American icon, upending or at least questioning cliché, which, in the case of Emily Post, is that of a fussy, obsessive woman preoccupied with which fork one should use. This, as Claridge points out, was a misinterpretation that exasperated the writer, who held that the point of etiquette was not to burden people with rules but to make them comfortable.
Claridge begins with the most uncomfortable experience of Post's life, the extremely public unraveling of her marriage to the handsome, reckless Edwin Post, a stockbroker, who had promptly lost interest in the wealthy young woman after she became his wife. The anticipation of the 1905 scandal, which involved a scorned chorus girl, extortion, a sting operation, a court trial and Emily Post's humiliation, animates the early sections of the book.
Born in Baltimore, seven years after the Civil War ended, Emily and her family moved to New York when she was 5. A "southern girl manqué," Emily was the daughter of Bruce Price, a dashing architect (he designed the vacation enclave Tuxedo Park), and Josephine Lee, who possessed a "certain bland sturdiness" and a Pennsylvania coal fortune, which assured the family's upper-class status. Claridge tracks Emily's rise from vivacious debutante to poised but neglected society wife and mother against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, deftly tucking in such capsule anecdotes as the déclassé Vanderbilts vying for high-society acceptance and instructions for preparing terrapin, which includes a directive one isn't likely to forget: "Remove the skin from the feet."
Emily Post's publishing career began in 1902 when Francis Hopkinson Smith, a family friend, passed on some of her letters to an editor at Ainslee's Magazine. A first novel soon followed, and then a second about a depressed and lonely wife, released just after the sprawling scandal of her husband's infidelity. They were divorced in 1906, and though they had two sons together, she never spoke of her ex-husband again.
