Matthew Goodman’s Eighty Days is a biography of two remarkable adventurers. In November 1889, two writers, rivals, and trailblazers embarked on separate quests to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. Setting out from New York City by steamship was Nellie Bly, who had made a name for herself as a muckraking investigative reporter on Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper, while heading in the other direction by train was Elizabeth Bisland, another young journalist, from The Cosmopolitan magazine. Newspapers relished the race that pitted the two daring women against each other, and Goodman’s behind-the-scenes account is as gripping as it is inspiring. To celebrate the paperback release of the book, Biographile caught up with the author to find out more about this remarkable story.

Biographile: How did you first become interested in these characters and this story? Was there a particular moment of discovery that sparked your research?

Matthew Goodman: My previous book, The Sun and the Moon, about a newspaper hoax in 1835, had featured exclusively male characters; I felt that for my next book I wanted to write primarily about female characters, because I thought that would be an interesting artistic challenge. So I began looking around for a fascinating woman with a story that wasn't widely known, and one day I came across a reference to Nellie Bly. It happens that I live in Brooklyn, NY, not far from the site of what used to be called the Nellie Bly Amusement Park; I knew Nellie Bly as the namesake of this amusement park, and I knew as well that she had been a journalist, but I didn't know much else about her. I researched her further, and discovered that she was a female journalist unlike any other New York had ever seen: scrappy, hard-driving, ambitious, seeking out the most sensational news stories, often going undercover to expose social injustice. (In her very first news story she feigned madness in order to be committed to the Blackwell's Island Lunatic Asylum, to expose the terrible conditions endured by the female patients there.) But where was the story for me to write about?

Well, I kept reading about her, and eventually I stumbled across a reference to her race around the world, and that brought me up short because I didn't know anything about it. I thought it was remarkable that a young woman, unaccompanied and carrying only a single bag, would be daring enough to race around the world in the year 1889 -- and to try to do it faster than anyone ever had before. That's when I knew that I wanted this to be the subject of my next book.

But then I discovered something even more interesting: that in fact Bly was competing against another young female journalist, Elizabeth Bisland, who had left New York on the very same day, heading in the opposite direction. I was captivated by the notion of these two young women racing each other around the world -- one traveling east, the other west.

BIOG: What were the particular challenges of writing a dual biography?

MG: I knew from the beginning that this had to be a story with alternating points of view -- one chapter from Bly’s perspective, the following from Bisland’s. The fact that they were traveling around the world in different directions, and thus were never in the same spot at the same time, was helpful here, as it meant that the reader could move back and forth around the globe from chapter to chapter. I knew that Nellie Bly was a deeply fascinating character -- feisty, funny, ambitious, tough-talking -- and that there was lots of available material on her. But about her rival, Elizabeth Bisland, I knew virtually nothing -- and very little biographical information had ever been produced about her. She could have been just about anybody, and what if it turned out that she was an otherwise very conventional, boring person? It meant that readers would likely be skipping over the Bisland chapters to get back to Nellie Bly. Fortunately for me, she turned out to be a wonderful character, as compelling in her own way as Nellie Bly was in hers.

BIOG: Did you find yourself rooting for one of the women to win the race?

MG: People ask me this a lot, and I always have to remind them that I knew right from the beginning who won the race! So I wasn't really "rooting" in that sense. What I was really rooting for, as the book’s writer, was for the two women to be characters as complex, challenging, and interesting as they could possibly be -- and in that sense, they did not let me down.

BIOG: One of the great pleasures of the book is discovering the little-known Elizabeth Bisland. How did you first find out about her?

MG: Thank you! In the beginning Elizabeth Bisland was little more than a name to me, and there really wasn't much in the way of available biographical information about her. So I was attempting to re-create a life almost from scratch. I started out by reading everything that she had ever written -- her own book about the around-the-world race, of course, but beyond that all of her essays and poetry and her newspaper and magazine reportage -- to try to find my way inside her mind, to discover what she cared about and how she thought about the world. There were also bits and pieces of autobiographical information in that writing, which provided clues that I could then pursue. It was a bit like being a detective. Online I found several contemporaneous articles about her, including an entry in the Library of Southern Literature, which had some valuable information previously unknown to me. Using genealogical services I was also able to track down some of her ancestors, one of whom, luckily enough, had produced an unpublished family history. And at the very end of my work on the book I found a cache of letters, held at Tulane University in New Orleans, that Bisland wrote in the last twenty years of her life. It was genuinely moving to read those letters, written in Bisland’s own handwriting on her personalized stationery; they really provided the answers to the last remaining mysteries about her.

BIOG: What surprised you most about the historical period in which the race took place? Do you think it reveals an unexpected side of the Victorian era?

MG: For me, one of the exciting things about telling the story of Bly and Bisland’s around-the-world race is that it provides a natural opportunity to explore larger questions about the time period: the changing social roles of women, obviously, but also such things as the growth of technology (after all, the two women were traveling on the most modern steamships and railroads and sending back reports of their progress via telegraph); the changing newspaper business; and class and colonialism -- the two women stopped at British colonies all along the route.

It also inevitably brought up the astonishing power of the railroad companies at the time, and this in turn led me to a fascinating discovery. Did you know that the four national time zones were established by the railroads in 1883? Up to that time local communities were able to establish their own time zones -- Illinois contained 27 different time zones, and Wisconsin had 38. The Pittsburgh train station had six clocks, and each one showed a different time. This made it very difficult to run a railroad, needless to say, and so in 1883 representatives of the largest railroads met at a General Time Convention in Chicago, and broke the country up into four time zones. This was done without the consent of the President, Congress, or the Supreme Court, but it quickly became the de facto law of the land. Ever since then, we've all been living on railroad time.

BIOG: Since the book was first published in hardcover, what kind of reactions have readers had to the story?

MG: I have to say I've been gratified by readers’ reactions to the story; the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m especially pleased that it seems that about half of the book’s readers tell me that they were rooting for Nellie Bly to win the race, and about half were rooting for Elizabeth Bisland. That’s what I was hoping for -- I didn’t want to create a story that had a heroine to root for and a villainess to root against, but rather one with two equally compelling, sympathetic characters. If you tend to like earthy, ambitious, socially minded women you’ll probably root for Bly; if you prefer more genteel, poetic, erudite women you might root instead for Bisland.

In either case, one of the things I most liked about writing Eighty Days was the opportunity to re-introduce Nellie Bly to a new generation of readers, who might not have known much about her, and also introduce them to Elizabeth Bisland, about whom they surely knew nothing. Not long after the hardcover publication of the book I got an email from one of Bisland’s ancestors down in Louisiana, who wrote to say that the Bisland family all knew about what a wonderful person she had been, but that very few others did because she had always been so personally reticent about putting herself forward; and to thank me for bringing her story to a wider public. That was, for me, extraordinarily gratifying.

BIOG: Do you have a new project in mind that you can share?

MG: It frankly took me a long time -- more than a year -- to find a new book topic, because I wanted to find one that was going to be as interesting as Bly and Bisland’s race around the world, and they set the bar pretty high. But at long last I have found one. It’s still in the early stages, so I’m not talking about it specifically, but I will say that it’s another narrative history, but a very different sort of story, one set in the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. Like Eighty Days, though, it’s an exciting narrative that also tells a larger story about history and culture. At least I hope it will.