Eighty Days - Matthew Goodman

This is the story of a race around the world by two women in 1890, Nellie Bly, reporter for the New York World comes from poverty in Pittsburgh and makes a name as an investigative reporter.  Elizabeth Bisland comes from the deep south, daughter of a plantation owner in Louisiana who suffers the displacement of the Civil War and the loss of family fortune, she goes to New Orleans to begin her writing career and ends up in New York working for Cosmopolitan Magazine.  

Bly is sent East to circle the globe and with less than 24 hours notice Bisland is sent West as a competitor of Bly.  We see the world through these two travelers and the contrast in how they see the world is fascinating.  It is a comparison between a woman who hates England and finds everything about America better than anything else in the world with her competitor embracing and falling in love with Japan and eventually moving to England.

Jules Verne is visited by Nellie Bly and it is his fictitious character's Around the World In Eighty Days race that inspires this race.  So even though they are racing each other, the women are in fact racing a fictitious person.  It does show how literature can inspire.

The story is also about the place of women and their struggle to survive.  The attitude that women belong in the home and not in the workplace was prevalent in their lifetime - it still lingers in ours - and yet when the fathers die, the daughters are often the sole support of the widowed mother and these women have to create a home and care for their families.

There is a wonderful passage in Hong Kong where Elizabeth Bisland reflects on the speed of communications now that there is the telegraph.  Today we would be upset to think we had to send Morse code and wait for a response.  This and the travel accommodations help us contrast time periods.

The trip around the world is the same year as the Massacre at Wounded Knee, it is a time of rampant racism, and terrible treatment of works who are trying to strike for living wages.  Yet in the midst of this the race consumes the American Public, makes a celebrity of one woman, and disregards the efforts of the loser.

The book follows the two women to the ends of their lives and it is a stark contrast as their personalities might have suggested from the beginning.  Who really wins, who really loses?  That is something the public decides and even today we have not learned to appreciate the efforts of those who try but do not come in first.