Living in genteel poverty with her ageing widow of a mother and only one servant, Miss Bates was nonetheless on visiting terms with the best in Highbury society.
[2] Those who see Austen as painting uncritically a rural paradise should remember the latter's words to Emma:[3] “She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and if she live to old age, must probably sink more”.
[4] Miss Bates has as her main characteristic an unending flow of trivial speech, freely associating from one unimportant event to another – something which was to make her an immediate comic success among Austen's first readership.
[6] Her speech is overtly a recognition of her grateful dependence on her neighbours, but it can also be seen, in its overwhelming impact on other characters, as almost tyrannical in its passive-aggressive self-assertion.
[7] Austen was, like Miss Bates, the unmarried daughter of a clergyman's widow, and, while she herself was notoriously silent in company,[8] her letters by contrast have a rambling, inconsequential flow that has been compared to the speech of her creation, for example:[9] “my coarse spot, I shall turn it into a petticoat very soon.