The thing I love about biographies is not just learning about whoever is the subject of the book, but about the period and place they lived in. I found that especially to be the case with the last biography I read, and and Laura Claridge's Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners appears to be filled with all sorts of interesting facts about America's Gilded Age along with Emily Post's history. This is a pretty hefty biography, weighing in at nearly 500 pages, so I think it may take me a little time to work my way through it. I love nonfiction, but generally there is so much to take in, I can only read them in small chunks. I have been reading this during my lunch hour and am really enjoying it so far.
It seems most biographies start from the very beginning, going back to the subject's parents, and this book is no different. Emily Post came from a wealthy and somewhat influential family. She was an only child and much closer to her father than her mother. She was a very independent child, and while the Posts were not really of that higher strata of American aristocracy, they did float around in those higher social circles. Still, Emily's parents instilled in her the kind of "quality" that had nothing to do with money or birth.
Introductions always give great overviews, so here's a little of what I've been reading about and what I have to look forward to:
"Emily Post entered the world only seven years after America's Civil War end. Though most of her family sided with the Union, a few renegade relatives fought with the South, the staunch loyalists who survived spinning heroic stories of General Lee and his horse Traveller throughout their lives. At the time of Emily's birth in Baltimore, women were being jailed for promoting birth control for married couples; when she died in New York City, women and men, married or not, were campaigning for legalized abortion. A few years before her funeral, befuddled but fascinated, even now, by the latest technology that celebrated the ingenuity of the age, she would watch, on television, the launch of Sputnik."
Isn't it amazing to think her life spanned so many changes--cultural, political and social. Many of them were hugely sweeping changes. I know things are constantly changing and shifting, but the times don't seem to vary so much to me now. Or maybe it's only because we're living them? She was a child in the Victorian era, a young woman in the Gilded Age. She lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. By the time she died in the 1960s the world must have seemed completely alien to where she began. From long dresses to miniskirts!
Since this is such a long book, I may post on it several times as I'm reading. I've had a great run of biographies this year, and I have several more lined up after I finish reading about Emily. Nonfiction can really be addicting after a while, though I can still only manage one book at a time!