Rewriting “Miss Bates”

Jane Austen’s novel “Emma” was published in 1815 and revolves around the eponymous protagonist Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy member of the landed gentry in Regency England who lives with her widowed father in the large fictional village of Highbury. Catherine Cliff’s stunning debut novel “Miss Bates: Emma Revisited,” although a spin-off novel, is anything but. Yes, it lifts the names and some of the plot from Austen but flies off to become a stand-alone tragicomedy revolving around her own eponymous protagonist, Miss Henrietta Bates. In “Emma,” Miss Bates is merely a secondary character. In both novels, she is a member of the gentry, making her the social equal of Emma. Austen’s Miss Bates is not only poor, but also a chatterbox who’s nevertheless kind and sweet. In Cliff’s book, however, her poverty is so extreme that she sometimes drinks hot water as a substitute for dinner, and lurking behind her chattering, she’s anything but sweet.

At the start of Austen’s novel, Emma is almost 21. By the standards of Regency England, she teeters on the precipice of spinsterhood. Facing this moment, most middle-class women of the time either married — which meant losing of control of whatever property they had to their husbands, as happens in Cliff’s novel with Henrietta’s mother — or became governesses, a precarious, wage-earning position. Emma’s wealth, by contrast, ensures her economic future. In both novels, she declares that she is happy with her status and will never marry.

Austen’s Emma is both independent-minded and beautiful, but she’s also self-centered and manipulative. She takes special delight in using her charms and wiliness to try to direct the lives of various people around her, which leads to unforeseen — and dire — consequences. At a picnic, Emma mocks Miss Bates for her habit of blathering on about more or less nothing. Afterward, Mr. Knightley, the lifelong friend of the Woodhouse family, severely chastises her for such lack of compassion and pity toward a woman with less privilege. Soon, Emma begins working to correct her flaws, and the novel culminates in an Austen ending where a reformed Emma marries the worthy Mr. Knightley

Nothing of this arc of a slowly maturing Emma appears in Cliff’s “Miss Bates.” Instead, the author morphs the flawed but redeemable Emma into a bad-seed child who grows up to become a supercilious and cruel woman. As for Miss Bates, most often referred to by Cliff as “Henrie,” her childhood nickname, Austen’s kindness and sweetness is replaced by a “relentless engine of [feigned] appreciation” directed at all but those whom she actually loves — her sister Jeannette, her niece Jane Fairfax, and the babies and children she often cares for. Bitter, angry, and sometimes violence-tinged soliloquies continually fill Henrie’s head, but Cliff manages to make them genuinely funny. Henrie’s outward monologues, in which she havers endlessly to the annoyance of everyone around her, turn out to come from her troubled psychological makeup. The narrator says the “cloud of words she created gave her room to think — a mask for her mind,” adding, “Anxiety made the words come gushing out like an intestinal illness. She didn’t know when it would happen until it did, and had little ability to stop it.”

Although Henrie grew up in a well-off vicar’s family that habitually brought “bounty baskets” to poorer members of the village, a downward spiral begins immediately upon her father’s death, when it’s discovered that through his profligacy, no money remains for her or her elderly mother. From then on, it’s a constant fight to stave off hunger and keep a roof over their heads. Humiliatingly, it’s now their turn to receive bounty baskets. When Henrie is an adult, she receives a gift of spectacles from her sister, whom she’d deeply loved and cared for from childhood until she married and moved away. The glasses enable her to see a “devastating” image in the mirror: a face pockmarked from smallpox, a moustache above her mouth and hair resembling that of a shaggy bear. Worst of all, she sees the truth of what she’s overheard others often say — that she has a nose “like a Gloucestershire Old Spot.” A pig’s nose.

By making her poverty extreme and her looks not merely plain but ugly, Cliff stacks almost all the cards against Henrie. Save one: her will to survive and ensure those she loves not only survive but thrive. When her beautiful young niece Jane Fairfax is stricken with consumption, Henrie nurses her for weeks, and when she dies, the narrator says “the social contract breaks” for Henrie. In Austen’s book, Jane Fairfax neither gets sick nor dies. The larger truth Cliff offers is that there are actually two social contracts — one for the Henries of this world, for whom the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ description of life as “solitary, brutish, poor, nasty, and short” prevails, and the other for the Emmas, who get to live by John Locke’s natural right to life, liberty, and property.

Cliff, who grew up in New York City and now lives in Sheffield, will discuss “Miss Bates: Emma Revisited” at the Scoville Memorial Library on Sunday, Nov. 22 at 4:30 p.m., followed by a reception and book signing. To register, visit scovillelibrary.org.