Emily Katharine Bates

Emily Katharine Bates (1846 – 13 February 1922) was an English spiritualist author, travel writer, and novelist.

Biography Emily Katharine Bates was born in 1846 in Dover, England, the youngest child of the Anglican Reverend John Ellison Bates and Ellen-Susan Carleton. She was orphaned at age nine. Her brother Charles Ellison Bates was injured in the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1878 and she took charge of his care.

In 1885 and 1886, Bates travelled through the United States and Canada, resulting in the book A Year in the Great Republic (1887). In her book, she wrote about the difficulties of railroad and stagecoach travel: delays, poor food and lodging, train and stage accidents, labour conditions, and injuries and deaths of tourists.

Bates died in Bournemouth, on 13 February 1922, aged 75.