Miss Bates: Emma Revisited

"A delicious premise."—Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review

"I read Miss Bates in a single, enraptured sitting. Cliff's prose is a joy — precise and rich and wickedly observant."—Belle Burden, New York Times bestselling author of Strangers

Miss Bates, creepy, funny, and heartbreaking, is a daring reimagining of the world of Jane Austen's Emma. But make no mistake, this is no marriage plot; it is a spinster plot. Or maybe, it is the spinster’s plot.

Henrietta Bates, the iconic bore of Emma, is the opposite of handsome, clever, and rich Emma: she is plain, ill-educated, and impoverished. An unmarried woman of quite a different order from that novel's proudly single heroine, she is an object of scorn and pity, whose survival depends upon the generosity of her neighbors which she barters for with an unrelenting shower of banal and grateful chatter.

But what if the woman we see in Emma were actually deliberately assuming a role, donning a mask, as a means of managing an untenable situation? What if there was a world of difference between her inward and outward voice? What would the Woodhouses’s Highbury look like from herperspective?

Miss Bates by Catherine Cliff imagines answers to these questions as it chronicles Henrietta Bates's unexpected and, at times, violent life, navigating a world with no ready-made opportunities, where the stakes are of the highest order. In a debut that is by turns comedic, tragic, startling, and altogether brilliant, Miss Bates turns Austen’s poignant and ridiculous side character into a feminist force who understands innately the life she has been dealt and how to slyly play it to her advantage.