Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, this time with a post in honor of Women’s History Month. For once I will not be writing about a sixteenth-century woman.

Way back in 1988, after I had written a middle-grades biography of journalist Nellie Bly, I sold an article to Highlights for Children about one of her most famous exploits, her trip around the word in 1889. Her goal was to beat the fictional record set in Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, but my focus was on the fact that Nellie was not the only one in the race. Her competition was a rival journalist. Twenty-six-year-old Elizabeth Bisland was literary editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, which published lengthy first-hand accounts of her adventures.

Elizabeth’s publisher proposed the idea that she travel in the opposite direction—west to east while Nellie went east to west. At first she resisted the idea. She was uncomfortable with the potential notoriety. In an age when many women believed their names should only appear in print when they were born, when they married, and when they died, Elizabeth did not even use a byline on articles she wrote for her magazine. Even more concerning was that she was given only five hours to prepare for a trip that would last for months. Nellie Bly left New Jersey at 9:30 AM on Thursday, November 14. Elizabeth boarded a train for San Francisco that same evening, her hastily assembled belongings packed in a steamer trunk, a Gladstone bag, and a “shawl strap.”

At first she made good time. She reached Japan on December 8 and was in Hong Kong on the 18th. Halfway to Singapore, her ship passed the one Nellie was on and when Nellie reached Hong Kong on December 22, she learned for the first time that not only was she was in a race, but that “the other woman” was “a good five days ahead of” her.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, traveled on to Ceylon, where she took another steamer to Italy. Boarding a mail train, she reached England two months after leaving New York. It was at that point, however, that her luck ran out. The weather turned against her and the voyage from England to New York took twelve days. She completed her trip in seventy-six days, beating the time of Jules Verne’s hero, but Nellie Bly had beaten both records, arriving back at her starting point in just seventy-two days, six hours, ten minutes, and eleven seconds.

Although she was probably glad to have avoided the notoriety, Elizabeth Bisland ended up regarding her adventure in a positive light. She wrote the following in one of her articles:

I was a young woman, quite alone, and doing a somewhat conspicuous and eccentric thing, yet throughout the entire journey I never met with other than the most exquisite and unfailing courtesy and consideration; and if I had been a princess with a suite of half a hundred people I could have felt no safer or happier. It seems to me this speaks very highly for the civilization existing in all traveled parts of the globe, when a woman’s strongest protection is the fact that she is unprotected.

Why do I have a feeling she might not have felt so safe if she made the same journey today?

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

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