BOOK REVIEW: Eighty Days. Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman

For our next meeting, our book club has chosen Eighty Days. Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman.

The book is a dual biography of these two adventurous women. Nellie Bly is the better known historical figure. She initially made her name as a journalist by going undercover to write exposés. However, determined to make her mark on the world and to prove women could be as successful as men, she proposes to her editor that her next project be beating the fictional record for circumnavigating the globe recounted in Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Although the idea was rejected at first, as the editor began to realize that someone was likely to undertake the task soon and it would be a greater publicity stunt to send a woman than a man, he gave her the green light.

Elizabeth Bisland was also a writer, but she wrote more literary articles for a monthly magazine. Her editor decided that it would be an even greater publicity stunt to send another woman around the world in the opposite direction to see who would come in first. Elizabeth was reluctant, but seemed to have been given little choice. She was aware it was a race, but Nellie was not.

The book goes into lengthy detail, sometimes absorbing and sometimes rather plodding, describing their itinerary, traveling quirks, hazards, people they meet, impressions of distant locales and peoples, and their thoughts on the undertaking. There are also numerous digressions that give a great deal of detail about things touching upon the various modes of transportation, sights they saw, and the lives of people they came into contact with. An eighty-day race is a fairly slow-paced one, but the book would have been more interesting if some of the extraneous detail was pared away to give it more sense of urgency.

The personalities of the two women were quite opposite and they were differently affected by the venture. In some ways, the short summaries of their lives afterward was more compelling than the story of the race.