The Etceterist sits down with Laura Claridge, author of Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners. See Joni Evans’s welcome to Billy Norwich on our site by clicking here.

THE ETCETERIST: Everything I presumed I knew to be true about Emily Post was wrong. She wasn’t a prim, little old lady who dispatched rules about cocked baby fingers and teacups and elbows off the table.

LAURA CLARIDGE: Hardly.

ETC: In fact, when she was asked about elbows on the table, she basically said, “Who cares?” Her message, dispatched through the more than ten editions of her etiquette bible first published in 1922, which she revised regularly until 1955, was the golden rule: Treat others as you would wish them to treat you. This well-born Social Register debutante daughter from Baltimore helped Americans welcome rapid innovations — from electricity, the automobile, the telephone, the radio — and she was an outspoken populist who encouraged people to not isolate behind social conventions and rules, but open their doors literally and figuratively to new ideas and new people celebrating the great American ideal of diversity and “the melting pot.”

LC: She was extraordinarily modern.

ETC: Plus, she was an architect, she designed the apartment building at 39 East 79th Street for instance, and a literary woman, a protégé of Mark Twain, a brilliant businesswoman who created the template for careers like Martha Stewart’s and Oprah Winfrey’s. All of this was a revelation as well as her shocking, painful divorce in 1905 when her husband’s infidelities were made public after he refused to be blackmailed by a newspaper editor to keep them secret.

LC: Yes, Emily Post was democratic in the best sense of the word, striking down form in the name of substance any time she could. Appearing in court daily at her husband’s side as he sought to bring down his blackmailer, the publisher of the gossip sheet “Town Topics,” she handled herself with real dignity masking great sorrow. After her divorce she had to work — she was the mother of two young sons. She also wanted to work for her self-esteem, and she had written and published several novels and short stories, some of them very well reviewed. Then the idea came for her, in the early 1920s, age 50, to write an etiquette book, encouraged by Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield. And the success of the book enabled her to have the incredibly busy professional life she chose over everything. In this regard, she was very emancipated for her age.

ETC: She never married again. Never even dated, it seemed. In fact, reading the book and your descriptions of the close relationship that developed over time with her secretary and companion Hilda Ogren I kept waiting for the big news: Emily Post was a lesbian? “What needs the gruff servant with a heart of gold … fulfilled through her relationship with her employer are unclear,” you write.

LC: (Laughs.) Every month as I progressed with the book, my husband would ask, “Well, is she?” I kept hoping — it would be such big news — and I kept going back to her grandson and asking, “Don’t you think, just maybe?” I expected him to be outraged but not at all. “You know,” he said, “we kind of wondered that too because of her relationship with Hilda but we don’t think that, after the divorce, there ever was another man, or a woman. Sex was just gone.”

ETC: Because of her entrepreneurial agility, combined with the invention of the radio and her syndicated newspaper columns, Emily Post and her golden rule of enlightened manners and kindness, really was an oracle. Writing in The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes how, after her husband died, how much the enlightened, kindly chapter on funerals in the 1922 edition of Emily’s book on etiquette helped her. Do you think she was the Oprah of her day?