Hello Bookfluencers,
Summer reading choices are here!
We are excited to welcome debut author Catherine Cliff and her forthcoming Austenesque novel, Miss Bates: Emma Revisited, publishing with Pegasus Books, July 7, 2026.
- ON TOUR: Instagram Release Week Book Blast, July 6 – 10, 2026 with Great Reads Book Promotion.
Miss Bates is a daring re-imagining of an Austen classic from the unflinching viewpoint of the misunderstood Miss Bates. Darker and more realistic to the era than Austen’s light, bright, and sparkling (at times) prose, Cliff explores society’s limitations for women and how Miss Bates works the system to her advantage.
If you read The Other Bennet Sister or have seen the new BBC adaptation of the novel and enjoyed it, you will be thrilled to meet another of Austen’s minor characters whose backstory and inner life are explored in more detail in Miss Bates.
If Miss Bates sounds like your cup of tea, then please read on for more information about the book, the author, and the campaigns.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Henrietta Bates, the iconic bore of Austen’s 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 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.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“In this bold and beguiling debut, Catherine Cliff performs a feat that would make even the great Jane Austen raise an eyebrow: she rescues Miss Bates from the margins of Emma and restores to her a rich, secret interior life. Long dismissed as the garrulous bore of Highbury, Henrietta Bates emerges here as a woman of fierce intelligence and quiet strategy, whose endless chatter is not foolishness but armor; a performance honed for survival in a society that has no place for the poor, the plain, or the unmarried.” ― Paula Byrne, author of The Real Jane Austen and Six Weeks by the Sea
PUBLISHER | AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | GOODREADS
AUTHOR BIO
Catherine Cliff was born and raised in New York City. She graduated from Harvard, received an MPhil from Cambridge, and a doctorate in English literature from Yale. After a number of years in London and Basel, she now lives in western Massachusetts. This is her first novel.
WEBSITE | GOODREADS | INSTAGRAM
CAMPAIGN DETAILS
- Publisher: Pegasus Books
- Publication Date: July 7, 2026
- Genre: Historical Fiction, Austenesque Fiction
- Instagram Release Week Book Blast: July 6 – 10, 2026
Additional information about the type of post and its requirements, the availability of complimentary books, your choice of dates, the selection process & notification, and terms of our agreement are included in the campaign application.
Are you ready to return to Austen’s world with Miss Bates to discover her backstory and future life?
If so, please apply before Thursday, April 16, 2026
As always, thank you for your continued support of the authors and publishers that we work with and their new books.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
The Great Reads Book Promotion Team
Book cover, description, and author bio compliments of Pegasus Books © 2026; text The Curated Campaign Blogof Great Reads Book Promotion © 2026, an Amazon affiliate. No AI: material on greatreadsbookpromotion.com may not be used in datasets for, in the development of, or as inputs to generative AI programs.
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