cover image Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World

Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World

Matthew Goodman. Ballantine, $28 (498p) ISBN 978-0-345-52726-4

Two pioneering women hurtle across the globe—and into a changing future—in this stimulating true-life adventure story. Historian Goodman (The Sun and the Moon) follows the 1889 voyages of Nellie Bly, a New York World reporter who embarked on a headline-grabbing assignment to circumnavigate the world in a record-setting 75 days, emulating Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days, and Elisabeth Brisland, a literary essayist press-ganged by her magazine’s owner into racing Bly around the world in the opposite direction. Goodman vividly recreates their stormy, sea-sick travels and exotic Eastern ports of call while examining the revolutionary 19th-century culture of journeying: the proliferating webs of railways and luxury steamships; the swaggering might of the British Empire that guaranteed safe passage; Westerners’ sense of wonder at encountering unfamiliar peoples—and their casually bigoted sense of entitlement to rule over them. He also draws fascinating portraits of two self-made women who captured America’s imagination by defying its gender stereotypes. (When her editors balked at sending a woman, Bly vowed to beat any man sent in her place.) Deftly mixing social history into an absorbing travel epic, Goodman conveys the exuberant dynamism of a very unfusty Victorian era obsessed with speed, power, publicity, and the breaking of every barrier. Photos. (Mar.)