Elizabeth Bisland (1861–1929)

Elizabeth Bisland was born on a plantation in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana. During the Civil War, her family had to flee their home, and life was difficult when they returned. When Elizabeth was 12, they moved to her father's family home, which he had inherited, in Natchez, Louisiana. She began writing as a child, and as a teenager sent poetry to the New Orleans Times Democrat under a pseudonym. After her authorship was revealed to the editor, she went to New Orleans to work for the paper. Around 1887, Elizabeth moved to New York City and got a job writing for The Sun newspaper. Two years later, she was writing for a number of publications. She become the books editor at Cosmopolitan magazine and contributed to the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. Although she was a serious writer, she may be best known to history for a publicity stunt. Representing Cosmopolitan, she engaged in a race around the world with Nellie Bly, the investigative reporter for The New York World, in an attempt to beat the record of the fictional Phileas Fogg, hero of the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). It was a great adventure for two female journalists at a time when nearly all were confined to the "society" or "women's pages" -- if hired at all -- and women could not easily travel alone even near home. The trip was dreamed up by Nellie Bly to boost her paper's circulation; the editor of Cosmopolitan read about it on the day she left New York, and quickly summoned the shy, genteel Elizabeth to challenge her. Despite her protests, Elizabeth found herself leaving that evening, going west as Nellie went east. They crossed paths in the South China Sea around Christmas 1889. Elizabeth arrived home in New York on January 30, 1890, four days after Nellie. She wrote a series of articles for Cosmopolitan on her trip, later published as In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World (1891). In 1891, she married Charles Whitman Wetmore, a wealthy attorney who later became a utilities tycoon, but continued to write articles under her maiden name. She became the biographer of Lafcadio Hearn, whom she knew from New Orleans, publishing The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1906) to critical acclaim. Her last book, Three Wise Men of the East (1930), was published posthumously.