Emily Katharine Bates

Emily Katharine Bates (1846–1922) was a British spiritualist author, travel writer, and novelist.

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 candidly about the difficulties of railroad and stagecoach travel: delays, poor food and lodging, train and stage accidents, labor conditions, and injuries and deaths of tourists.

In the United States, she attended her first séance. She grew more active in spiritualism and while she continued to write travel books, her writing increasingly focused on spiritualism. She joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1891.

Bates died in Bournemouth, England on 13 February 1922.