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| Elizabeth Bisland |
By Marilyn Turk
You’ve probably read about Nellie Bly, the famous
journalist who went around in the world in 72 days to beat the fictional
Phileas Fogg of Jules Verne’s book, Around the World in Eighty Days.
What you might not know is that the trip was a race
between Nelly Bly who worked for The
World, the most widely-read newspaper of its time, and Elizabeth Bisland,
the literary editor of The Cosmopolitan
magazine.
Elizabeth was born on Fairfax Plantation in Louisiana in
1861. Life on the family plantation was difficult after the Civil War, so the
family moved to Natchez, Louisiana when she was twelve years old. She began writing as a teenager, sending
poems to the New Orleans Times Democrat
under the pen name of B.L.R. Dane. When her family and the paper discovered her
identity, she was paid for her work, eventually moving to New Orleans to work
for the paper.
Around 1889, she moved to New York City where she worked
for a variety of newspapers and magazines. When the publisher of The Cosmopolitan read about Nellie Bly’s
future trip around the world, he decided to make it a race and send his
literary editor, Elizabeth Bisland, in the opposite direction to do the same,
hoping she would beat Bly’s time. At first, she refused, because she did not want
the attention, but finally she gave in. So on the same day, November 14, 1889,
both women departed New York, but Bly went east and Bisland went west.
The
World excited its readers by posting sensational accounts of
Bly’s journey while ignoring Bisland’s journey. At the same time, The
Cosmopolitan’s coverage was less frequent, it being a monthly magazine.
Bisland was twenty-eight years old, tall and elegant,
gracious and intelligent, and an avid reader of literary works. Although a
beautiful woman, she once wrote, “After the period of sex-attraction has
passed, women have no power in America.” She was a hard-working woman, often
working eighteen hours a day, and was proud of the fact that she arrived in New
York City with only fifty dollars but had earned thousands by her own writing.
Elizabeth Bisland wrote
seven articles for The Cosmopolitan about
her race around the world. In 1890 these articles were published by Harper
& Brothers as a book entitled In Seven
Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World. Near
the end of the trip, cold, sleepless and hungry, Bisland hurried by train and
ferry through France, England, Wales, and Ireland to catch the steamship that
was her last chance to beat Bly, only to cross a storm-tossed North Atlantic.
In
the end, Elizabeth Bisland succeeded in beating Phileas Fogg’s eighty-day mark,
completing the trip in seventy-six days, which would have been the fastest trip
ever made around the world, except that Nellie Bly had arrived four days
earlier.
She
arrived home—as she had feared—famous, amazed to discover people had placed
wagers on who would win. She was even more amazed by the number of strangers
who sent cards and messages, who simply wanted to see her, as if she were an
exotic animal.
Unlike Nellie Bly, who upon her return to New York
immediately set out on a forty-city lecture tour, Bisland avoided publicity.
She gave no lectures, endorsed no products, and did not comment publicly on the
trip. Instead, at the very height of her popularity, Bisland left the United
States and sailed for Great Britain, where she lived the following year
surrounded by London’s literary society.
When she returned to New York, she married corporate attorney
Charles Wetmore, and together the two designed and built an estate on Long
Island they named Applegarth. At Applegarth, she became a highly productive
writer of several books and essays, writing until her death. In one of her final
collections of essays, she wrote “Toward Sunset” in which she observed, “That
old age may be agreeable to others and tolerable to itself, no other equipment
is so necessary as a vigorous sense of humour.” But old age itself, she was
quick to point out, “is not an amusing episode.”
Elizabeth Bisland died of pneumonia on January 6, 1929, at
the age of sixty-seven. Coincidentally, she was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery,
New York, the same cemetery where Nelly Bly was buried, who also died of
pneumonia in 1922.
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| Elizabeth Bisland in later years |
Marilyn Turk’s
roots are in the coastal South, raised in Louisiana, moved to Georgia, then
retired to Florida. Calling herself a “literary archaeologist,” she loves to
discover stories hidden in history. She is the author of two World War II
novels, The Gilded Curse and Shadowed by a Spy, and the Coastal Lights Legacy
series set in 1800s Florida—Rebel Light, Revealing Light, Redeeming Light, and
Rekindled Light—featuring lighthouse settings. Marilyn’s novella, The Wrong Survivor, is in the Great Lakes Lighthouse Brides collection. She
also writes for the Daily Guideposts
Devotions book.
