There are certain nonfiction writers—often critics, sometimes journalists—whose particular talents and tastes seem especially well matched to their era. One thinks of George Orwell, intellectually and morally lucid just when the world needed someone to be; Joan Didion, naturally paranoid, primed to sense and to describe societal doom; Pauline Kael, a critic whose influential career, not by accident, coincided with a golden age of American cinema.
Add to this list Nellie Bly, the late-nineteenth-century newspaper reporter. Her name was, at one time, on the tip of every literate and tabloid-loving person’s tongue. Her work changed public policy, her outfits influenced fashion trends, and her adventures inspired board games. Bly was talented and undeniably a celebrity, but she also owed part of her success to fortunate timing: her moxie was in concert with both the women’s-suffrage movement and the burgeoning of populist journalism. “Between 1870 and 1900, the number of newspaper copies sold each day rose almost sixfold,” Jean Marie Lutes, a Villanova University professor, writes in the introduction to “Around the World in Seventy-two Days and Other Writings,” Bly’s first collection, published in April, almost a hundred years after her death.
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864 to a poor family in western Pennsylvania, Bly had an almost irritatingly twee biography. Her childhood nickname was Pink; she owned a pet monkey and, despite little formal education, enjoyed an illustrious, precocious career. At the age of thirty, she married a millionaire who was almost a half century her senior.
Bly got her auspicious start in 1885, after writing an anonymous, extremely caustic response to a misogynist article in the Pittsburg Dispatch. Her letter caught the eye of the paper’s editor-in-chief, who advertised for the author to reveal herself so that he could hire her as a columnist.
Nellie Bly (her new pen name) spent almost a year fielding assignments that fell into a category that is now sometimes called “the pink ghetto”—pieces on fashion, decorating, entertaining, and gardening. Fed up, she went freelance and travelled to Mexico, where, in the course of six months, she filed more than thirty dispatches as a foreign correspondent.
After moving back to the United States, Bly landed a job at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. For her first assignment, she got herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum, on Blackwell’s Island. It was the beginning of a pioneering career in stunt journalism that would include pretending to be an unemployed maid, an unwed mother looking to sell her baby, and a woman seeking to sell a patent to a corrupt lobbyist. She also dabbled in elephant training and in ballet. In an era when Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were engaged in a journalistic arms race for the most pyrotechnics in print media, Bly was an industry darling, the woman who popularized a genre that was as robust a century ago as it is today.
“Behind Asylum Bars,” Bly’s serialized account of her stay in the madhouse, showcases her reportorial skills and her wry way with language. She lived for a few days at a boarding house for destitute women, where she performed insanity so convincingly that her first assigned roommate refused to sleep in the same room with her “for all the money of the Vanderbilts.” Bly was then brought in for a medical examination: “I had not the least idea how the heart of an insane person beat, so I held my breath,” she wrote. “I puzzled to know what insanity was like in the eye, so I thought the best thing under the circumstances was to stare.” After being declared “positively demented,” she was sent to Bellevue, which had “that peculiar whiteness seen only in public institutions.” She was soon transferred to Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), where she joined some sixteen hundred other women—a “helpless class”—and was subjugated to inhumane treatment that included ice-cold baths, flimsy garments, and meals consisting of nothing more than “stuff honored by the name of tea,” bread with rancid butter, and a few prunes. “What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” she asked.
Bly recounted her exchanges with her fellow-inmates with great sympathy. Many of them, it turned out, were not mentally ill in the slightest—they were merely immigrants who didn’t know English. Bly’s experience at Blackwell’s Island caused her to lose her faith in doctors, and to question the “human trap” that counted as humane, and necessary, confinement in fin-de-siècle America. The story prompted a grand-jury investigation and, ultimately, a series of overhauls at the asylum. Like much of Bly’s other writing, “Behind Asylum Bars” is about disenfranchised citizens. But, reading “Around the World in Seventy-two Days,” one gets the sense that Bly was motivated as much by curiosity and egotism as by a progressive mission. Bly’s popularity, it barely needs stating, was a result less of her political ideology than of her gumption.
In a later column, “Should Women Propose?,” Bly posed the question to influential figures of the day. In another article, she interviewed Susan B. Anthony and complimented her “well-shaped head.” In 1887, Bly got a job in a Lower East Side tenement making boxes for an unlivable salary. The proto-Barbara Ehrenreich story that resulted was given the typically sensationalist headline “NELLIE BLY TELLS HOW IT FEELS TO BE A WHITE SLAVE.”
Bly’s most celebrated stunt was her trip around the world, provoked by the journey made by Jules Verne’s fictional hero in “Around the World in Eighty Days.” She set out on November 14, 1889, and the World made much of the fact that she would be travelling light and unchaperoned.
The many dispatches that followed, filed by telegram from all over the globe, were filled with delightful descriptions: “Dazed-looking, wan-faced people” on a transatlantic steamship; roads “as smooth as a ballroom floor”; rubies in Ceylon “like pure drops of blood.” The cross-continental reportage highlights Bly’s thick-skinned reactions to what most modern women would consider patronizing chivalry; her odd, almost sinister fixation on female beauty (she writes of women as though she wants to eat them); her shameless self-promotion.
Bly could be hilariously jaded, complaining that, in Aden, she found “nothing extraordinary” about a camel market. “Nearby was a goat market, but business seemed dull in both places,” she wrote. In Singapore, Bly met an orangutan: “While he seemed to be very clever, he had a way of gazing off in the distance with wide, unseeing eyes, meanwhile pulling his long red hair up over his head in an aimless, insane way that was very fetching.”
But Bly’s pluck doesn’t do quite enough to disguise what comes across, to a modern reader, as curiously uneven empathy. Just days after experiencing “a lively tussle with the disease of the wave,” she admits that “as heartless as I thought it was, I could not sympathize with a seasick man.” Asian beggars, she observed, are “so repulsive that instead of appealing to one’s sympathy they only succeed in arousing one’s disgust.” At different times, she said that Somalians are like bullfrogs and like cows; a Sri Lankan, she noted, has legs like “smoked herrings, they were so black, flat and dried looking.” She compared Mexican men to “hungry but well-bred dogs” and the Chinese to “a crowd of ants on a lump of sugar.” Such observations often conclude with bizarre proclamations. She wrote, for instance, that “Chinamen are very indifferent about death.” In her earlier reports, from Mexico, she said that the people were “worse off by thousands of times than . . . the slaves of the United States” and that “their lives are hopeless, and they know it.”
Bly was a crusader, but she could also be remarkably callous, a failing that’s particularly glaring—and galling—in the context of tourism. There is a sense in which Bly is both the grandmother of the genre and its principal cautionary tale.
When she returned to New York, seventy-two days after she set off, Bly was welcomed with ten celebratory gunshots from Battery Park and another ten from Fort Greene Park. Bly’s later years were as varied as her youth: she married an elder industrialist, retired from journalism to run his steel company, went bankrupt, returned to writing, reported from the front lines of Austria during the First World War, started an advice column, and arranged adoptions for American orphans. Bly died, of pneumonia, at the age of fifty-seven, and was buried in the Bronx.
Casual racism and charming provenance aside, Bly’s writing can be enjoyed today for its wit and its old-timey enthusiasm. And there are lessons to be learned from her professional life. Though Bly got her start with rightful, well-articulated rage, she didn’t let those qualities define her career. In “The Girl Puzzle,” Bly’s first published article, she argued that women should be allowed to do serious and interesting work, and that they should be equally compensated for it. The assignments that followed—the “life-style pieces”—weren’t what she wanted to be doing, but rather than rebel with polemic Bly travelled the world, interviewed politicians, and put herself in dangerous situations. Rather than work to expose unfair expectations, she chose to subvert them. Bly reported the stories that she believed she was entitled to write.
For young women just starting out in journalism today, it is perilously easy to fall into the trap of writing only about so-called women’s issues. In a media environment that reliably rewards trading on one’s gender identity, the financial incentive for young female writers to approach the world with a narrow set of politicized questions—the answers to which they already know—is great. And while there is surely a place for this, no girl grows up wanting to count bylines or to scour TV shows for signs of sexism. This week in particular, in the wake of Jill Abramson’s firing by the Times, is a good moment for women journalists to remember Nellie Bly, a flawed but still effective model who wrote about what she wanted instead of arming herself with the hammer she acquired in her youth and spending the rest of her career searching for nails.