Author Talk: Catherine Cliff

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We’re thrilled to welcome Catherine Cliff to Bedford Books!

She’ll be in conversation with bestselling author Karen Dukess about her recently released novel Miss Bates: Emma Revisited.

Books will be available for sale and signing, and light refreshments will be served. Ticket price includes a $20 shopping credit to use at the event.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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’ Highbury look like from her perspective?

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.

ABOUT CATHERINE CLIFF

Catherine Cliff grew up in New York City. She has a BA in Classics and English from Harvard and a doctorate in English literature from Yale, specializing in English Renaissance poetry. She lived in London and Basel for many years and is now settled in western Massachusetts. This is her first novel.

ABOUT KAREN DUKESS

Karen Dukess is the USA Today bestselling author of Welcome to Murder Week and The Last Book Party and is a contributor to the anthology (November 2025) Ladies in Waiting: Jane Austen’s Unsung Characters. She is also the host of The Castle Hill Author Talks with Karen Dukess, a podcast of Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill on Cape Cod for which she interviews today’s most exciting authors. Karen has been a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia, and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro on Cape Cod.