Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World
Ballantine Books
March 2013
On Sale: February 26, 2013
480 pages ISBN: 0345527267 EAN: 9780345527264 Kindle: B00985E32O Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly, the crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzerβs World newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. Also departing from New York that dayβand heading in the opposite direction by trainβwas a young journalist from The Cosmopolitan magazine, Elizabeth Bisland. Each woman was determined to outdo Jules Verneβs fictional hero Phileas Fogg and circle the globe in less than eighty days. The dramatic race that ensued would span twenty-eight thousand miles, captivate the nation, and change both competitorsβ lives forever.
The two women were a study in contrasts. Nellie Bly was a scrappy, hard-driving, ambitious reporter from Pennsylvania coal country who sought out the most sensational news stories, often going undercover to expose social injustice. Genteel and elegant, Elizabeth Bisland had been born into an aristocratic Southern family, preferred novels and poetry to newspapers, and was widely referred to as the most beautiful woman in metropolitan journalism. Both women, though, were talented writers who had carved out successful careers in the hypercompetitive, male-dominated world of big-city newspapers. Eighty Days brings these trailblazing women to life as they race against time and each other, unaided and alone, ever aware that the slightest delay could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
A vivid real-life re-creation of the race and its aftermath, from its frenzied start to the nail-biting dash at its finish, Eighty Days is history with the heart of a great adventure novel. Hereβs the journey that takes us behind the walls of Jules Verneβs Amiens estate, into the back alleys of Hong Kong, onto the grounds of a Ceylon tea plantation, through storm-tossed ocean crossings and mountains blocked by snowdrifts twenty feet deep, and to many more unexpected and exotic locales from London to Yokohama. Along the way, we are treated to fascinating glimpses of everyday life in the late nineteenth centuryβan era of unprecedented technological advances, newly remade in the image of the steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph. For Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bislandβtwo women ahead of their time in every sense of the wordβwere not only racing around the world. They were also racing through the very heart of the Victorian age.
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