She went undercover in a women's mental asylum in 1887 for an exposé
An excerpt from "A Woman's World", my new book in collaboration with Dan Jones
Nellie Bly was a successful journalist in the highly competitive New York newspaper market. In 1887 she sparked a craze for 'stung girls’ reporters - undercover journalism by women - by faking insanity to be committed to an asylum, then writing an exposé of conditions there. The 'Ten Days in a Mad-House’ articles, later a book, took her name into the headlines of her stories. To keep it there, she needed a sensational follow-up.
Bly liked to spend Sundays thinking of ideas to pitch her editor at the New York World in Monday meetings. At a loss one weekend, she wished she was half the world away on holiday. So she decided that she would aim to beat the record set by Jules Verne's fictional globetrotter Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days. With a plan constructed from steamship timetables, she pitched her boss. He said they'd thought of it before; what was more, as a woman, she would need ‘a protector’ to chaperone her and have too much luggage for swift transfers. Bly told them to send a man, and she'd do the trip for another paper. A year later, she was summoned into the editor's office, and he asked, ‘Can you start around the world the day after tomorrow?’
On 14 November 1889, Bly boarded the luxury liner Augusta Victoria at Hoboken, New Jersey for the seven-day journey to Southampton, England. She had with her one large handbag, containing underwear, slippers, her toiletries, pens, pencils, paper and a few other essentials, and only the clothes she was wearing. The Atlantic crossing was rough, but she put up with the seasickness, arrived in England, then went to France and interviewed Jules Verne in Paris. Next she visited Italy, then went through the Suez Canal to Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Japan. She sent short reports back via telegraph and longer insights via the post. Rough weather on the Pacific crossing from Yokohama meant she arrived in San Francisco two days behind schedule, but the Miss Nellie Bly Special, a train chartered by her paper, broke speed records on its journey to Chicago. Bly eventually arrived back in New Jersey on 25 January 1890: 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes after she left.
Bly - her real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane- quit reporting after the global adventure to write serialized novels for the papers and, later, to run her late husband's engineering firm. She returned to journalism after the firm went bankrupt, sending back dispatches from the Eastern Front in the First World War, before dying of pneumonia in January 1922, aged 57.
By then her circumnavigation record had been broken, but in setting it she took her place at the forefront of an important movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the adventurers, explorers, travellers and writers who dreamed big and made the world smaller are the women in this chapter. Some struck out to the edge of the Arctic in search of gold. Others plodded around Arabia and North Africa on camel-back. Others still explored the ocean floor or soared high above the Earth in dirigibles. All did remarkable things on their extraordinary journeys.
This is an excerpt from our new book, A Woman's World, published on August 4 by Head of Zeus. Get a copy today to support my work. Thank you so much!
