Adrien Behn on A RACE AROUND THE WORLD
Nellie Bly v. Elizabeth Bisland
Welcome back to SOURCE NOTES, and say hello to Adrien Behn, whose new podcast, A RACE AROUND THE WORLD, is out this week. It’s a late-Victorian adventure story about the circulation-driven, globe-circumnavigating escapades of Nellie Bly, writing for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and Elizabeth Bisland, an editor at John Brisben Walker’s recently-acquired, pre-Hearst iteration of Cosmopolitan. Which of these two intrepid young female journalists would be the first to make it from one end of the earth to the other and back again? Let’s hear all about it from Adrien…
Most people know about Nellie Bly from her famous “Mad-House” investigation, less so for her race around the world. Where did you first learn about it?
I was a very lost twenty-four-year-old. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, so I booked a one-way ticket to Mexico and I backpacked from Mexico to Peru. I'm in Bocas del Toro, this cluster of islands off of Panama in the Atlantic, and I'm at this bar, and I hear that there is this gentleman among us who has the Guinness World Record for going around the world without flying. So I introduce myself—his name is Graham—and we chat. I’m always looking for interesting travel stories. A few months go by and I have an actual interview with him, and he mentions that a woman once raced around the world in under eighty days, and that little seed stuck in the back of my brain for five or six years.
When was this?
Somewhere between 2014 and 2015. And 2021 is when I really started researching. I had just met the person who would later become my fiancé, and we escaped Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley, where my family is, and we lived on a sheep farm for six months, and during that time, we took a lot of long walks and I was like, well, how can I do a story about female travel where I actually don't have to physically be anywhere? And that seed bloomed.
And before long you realized there was even more to the story.
In my early research, I discovered that it wasn't just one woman, but two. From a narrative perspective, it is so perfect because they both leave on the same day. One woman goes east, the other goes west. They are diametrically opposite women. Nellie Bly is a hard-hitting journalist, she's so jazzed to go around the world. And Elizabeth Bisland gets roped into going just to sell a bunch of magazines for Cosmopolitan.
I wasn’t familiar with Elizabeth Bisland until now.
She's kind of the more interesting, I've never heard of this person before. She was a literary editor, and by the time she is plucked to go on this race, she is doing book reviews and I think poetry reviews for Cosmopolitan, which had just been bought by John Brisben Walker.
I know there's at least one major book on this topic, by Matthew Goodman, who also wrote a great book about The Sun’s 1835 Moon Hoax.
There were two books that I read. One I got from the Brooklyn Public Library, AROUND THE WORLD IN 72 DAYS. That one was mostly written in the eighties. The Matthew Goodman book, EIGHTY DAYS, is the one I heavily rely on and it’s great because it adds a lot of outside context. But also, both women wrote their own firsthand accounts.
I assume those were the main sources for your re-telling of the race.
Exactly. I really try to keep it as much in their voices as I can. The Matthew Goodman book has been really helpful to figure out, like, what day it is, because that's a bit of a guessing game. Neither of them give anything like, On December 9th… It's all blurred and meshed together based on location. I say that this podcast is “based off of” because I have to take some creative liberties in order to figure out what they are even saying or trying to express. And also because there are moments, at least in Nellie's account, where she's a bit of an unreliable narrator.
What other sources did you consult?
The Matthew Goodman book was the starting point, then I read both of their books, and then I went through newspapers.com. It’s mostly all American newspapers that I'm sourcing from
Like which ones? The New York papers?
San Francisco was a really big one, because Elizabeth gets a good amount of fanfare in San Francisco. Definitely the World. The Chicago Tribune is another one. Let’s see—the Standard Union in Brooklyn, the Atchison Daily Patriot in Kansas. In the very beginning, the news is pretty slow going, because it's not like today where I can tweet from Singapore and everybody gets live updates. They were mostly relying on telegrams, which were pretty few and far between, and they couldn't do that on steamships.
Did they publish their telegram dispatches along the way?
Elizabeth was writing for a magazine, which only published once a month. I haven't found any of Liz's firsthand telegrams, unfortunately. But Nellie's were printed in the papers.
What other research went into this?
I did a lot of research on the Victorian era—I read a whole book on Queen Victoria. And I've tried to research the political and cultural climate of each place they went. Most of the places they go are British ports that have been colonized or bartered over. I also really tried to focus on, what is the state of women in each place? Because Nellie and Liz are traveling at a time—they're not going to have rights for another thirty years. So part of it is looking into, how do they compare to local women at the same time?
You’re a world traveler yourself. Have you visited any places from their journeys that helped you recreate the settings?
I've been to all of the places they went to in Europe and the U.K., and I've been to Singapore. I definitely went through a ton of archives, like, what did Ceylon— modern-day Sri Lanka—look like in 1889?
Last one: what was your favorite scene to recreate based on their accounts and the information that was available to you?
My absolute favorite is episode nine, which is kind of the very end of both of their international travels. Nellie goes to Japan and Liz goes to Sri Lanka, and to Aden in Yemen. Both of them are just so in love and like, I want to keep traveling! This is the most incredible, beautiful thing that I've ever experienced! When you travel solo, especially as a female, it is the most alive you ever feel. You just feel this electric connection. And I definitely found both of them really felt that.
