Miss Bates

Emma Revisited: A Novel
“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 spinsters 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 o