Late one April evening in 2016, sitting at my desk not writing, an article in the Atlantic caught my eye. The premise was that there were more female action stars a hundred years ago than there are today. Most were in the mold of The Perils of Pauline, with an intrepid young woman leaping off horseback or clinging to the side of a train.
Intrigued, I started looking up these films referenced in the article only to discover that most of the daring fictional females they portrayed were newspaper reporters. Of them, the majority were based on Nellie Bly.
The name rang a very specific bell. In the second season of the television show The West Wing, the president's amorous intentions are thwarted one evening when he belittles the achievements of Nellie Bly, whose statue First Lady Abigail Bartlet had just unveiled. No longer in the mood, Abbey gives him a short biography of Nellie, which Jed again puts down. Needless to say, the night does not work out the way he planned.
That being my sole knowledge of this intrepid reporter, I typed “Nellie Bly” into The Googles and stayed up deep into the night reading, knowing I had struck gold.
Female characters drive historical fiction. My trouble has always been that the historical women who fascinate me—Cleopatra, Anne Boleyn, Boudicca, Isabella of Spain, Eleanor of Aquitaine—have all been done, and done well (I have the same problem with King Arthur stories—sure, I'd like to write one, but it's been done). Moreover, I have a deep resistance to writing about queens or princesses. In looking for a heroine, I wanted an exceptional woman who rose from nothing to make her mark.
As a writer, I was waiting for the right woman to come along.
In Nellie Bly, I found her.
Here I had the chance to explore early Feminism, a piece of history largely ignored in the fabric of American history. If Nellie is mentioned, it's for pioneering undercover journalism. Totally true, but hardly the whole story. It wasn't just how she got the stories. It was the stories she chose to tell. Fought to tell. Nearly died to tell.
What snagged my attention was how she became a reporter in the first place. Maybe because I love origin stories, maybe because it struck me as both brave and pointed. I was utterly thrilled by the story of the outraged letter that directly led to twenty-year-old Elizabeth Cochrane becoming the investigative reporter Nellie Bly. To me, that story sums her up. She was utterly incapable of remaining silent when facing injustice. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, her outrage is still palpable. Her energy, her drive, her vanity, her vitality, her vulnerability—it's all right there, laid bare in the pages of her stories.
After falling down a midnight internet rabbit hole, I couldn't resist. The next day, setting aside all plans of Star-Cross'd sequels or the long-awaited Othello novel, I dove into the research and started to write.
You hold the result.
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For sources, I've been blessed by two recent nonfiction examinations of Nellie Bly's life. The first is Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist by Brooke Kroeger. This is an exhaustive and amazingly researched work, examining every aspect of Ms. Bly's life, making all kinds of connections between the professional and the personal. I simply could not have written this novel without Ms. Kroeger's work.
The other recent work to which I owe a debt is Matthew Goodman's Eighty Days, an examination of Nellie's trip around the world. While those events are not depicted in this novel, his buildup to her journey is a magnificent look at her life, incredibly well-written. And his framing of the story, matching Bly with Elizabeth Bisland's counter-trip, is utterly brilliant. If you want to know what comes next for Bly, you cannot do better than Eighty Days.
Both Ms. Kroeger and Mr. Goodman were of direct help to me as well, graciously sending newspaper clippings that were missing from various library collections, and being generally encouraging about the novel itself.
Among other sources were Bylines: A Photobiography of Nellie Bly by Sue Macy; Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting, edited by David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla; Nellie Bly: First Woman Reporter by Iris Noble; The Amazing Nellie Bly by Mignon Rittenhouse; and Mexico City: A Cultural and Literary Companion by Nick Caistor.
Of course, the best resources available to me were Nellie Bly's own writings. For the historical novelist, having the words of one's subject is a tremendous advantage. This was my first time having such access, and I found it equal parts wonderful and daunting. Wonderful, because I had her story right there, in her voice. Daunting, because she had already covered most of the events in this novel herself, in great detail. I wanted to incorporate those articles into the fabric of her life's story, and quite often I have used a phrase or sentence from her own writings.
But that way danger lies. Again and again, I had to weigh her writing against the story I was telling. Just as I could not simply copy her work and present it here, I had qualms about substituting my own words when hers exist. This was a unique problem, and a marvelous one to have. I've tried to ameliorate it by using her experiences as the starting point for my research. Extra details about Pittsburgh, Mexico, and New York are filtered into her own firsthand accounts. Yet I'd be insane to abandon her own experiences—if she chose to write about them, they're important to her story! Especially in Mexico, I've used her own observations as the canvas to paint the story about her life. The great thing for me in that stretch was the presence of her mother, whom she omitted entirely from her articles. I hope that the Mexico and Madhouse sections of the book have more to them than simple regurgitation of her own books, both of which are well worth reading.
I've also tried, in my feeble way, to mirror her style—her preferred words, her tics, her modes of expression. I searched her writing for favored phrases and words. Still, times change—styles, too—so I have made her a bit less passive in her writing voice. I've also corrected several grammatical infelicities, especially in her Spanish (and, for the record, I adore Mexican food. In this novel, I merely reflect Ms. Bly's own feelings on the matter).
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One of the most interesting elements of this story is that Nellie is such a terrific reporter—except when it comes to herself. Her version of herself in her stories is fascinating, not only for the flattering elements she presents, but also the unflattering elements she omits. Just as she got caught up in the lie of illness or lack of funds when she left school, there are times when she is caught out in some exaggeration or other. She lied about her age nearly her whole life, even under oath. When it comes to Nellie Bly talking about herself, she is an unreliable narrator. This offered a marvelous challenge in crafting a whole person out of everything we know about both Elizabeth Cochrane and Nellie Bly.
It is not my job to discern her minor exaggerations from the facts. It's my job to tell a good story. So when faced with two differing accounts of events, I try to side with the more interesting for the narrative, as well as the one that makes the most sense.
All of this culminated in the “Madhouse.” Nellie has already given us her account, in her own words. In fact, she gave us three versions of it—the one printed in the World, the expanded book version, Ten Days in a Mad-House, and an 1889 piece for Godey's Lady's Book that she entitled “Among the Mad.”
Now, I'm not saying I don't believe her account—quite the contrary, I have taken her version of events as gospel. But, like the gospels themselves, there are elements omitted from the known story. I've worked them in, creating (I hope) a richer tapestry for the narrative, as one can do in fiction. I trust that what she says happened. I don't always trust her part in it.
There are certainly enough characters in Nellie Bly's own account of Blackwell's to populate this novel and many more (Miss Grupe was apparently the inspiration for Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Miss Grady makes an appearance in one of Bly's later works of fiction as a child-killing nurse). To their number I have added just one in passing, a real woman culled from the census records of the inmates of the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane near Seneca Lake. Octavia Ballard was one of just fifteen African American women incarcerated there between 1870 and 1900, out of a total of 1,107 women. Nellie does not mention seeing black women, but she would have, and so in my novel, she does.
Also, the way Nellie presents her stay on Blackwell's Island becomes more episodic than chronological, as if she wrote out her strongest memories rather than a day-by-day account. I aimed for the latter, building in stray facts she left out and elements from her own life that she would never have shared with the public.
Note—what was the 15th Precinct in 1887 is the 9th Precinct today, as there was a citywide renumbering of precincts in 1929.
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Something happened after the initial publication of this novel. While researching the sequel, I stumbled across an actual historical discovery. After her famous race around the globe in 1890, Bly quit reporting for three years and took a lucrative job writing serial novels for a weekly newspaper published by Norman Munro, her book publisher. No complete copies of the New York Family Story Paper exist today. We only knew the titles of two thanks to her letters and one stray issue that lives at Villanova University. So Bly's novels have been lost for 125 years.
Until December, 2019, when I found them. All eleven of them.
I spent the next fifteen months having them transcribed and edited, some by me, some by friends. They are an amazing window into Bly's mind, a collection of breathless gothic romances inspired in part or in whole by her reporting. These are now available, known collectively as The Lost Novels Of Nellie Bly. Check them out! You won't be disappointed.
While I was adding the back matter to those volumes, I ended up transcribing a slew of her articles as well. So while I was releasing Bly's own writing, I decided to do the one thing no one ever had—publish her complete reporting. That series begins with Nellie Bly's World, a four-volume collection of all her work for the New York World. Though by doing this, I have rather given away the game for the next novel…
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I owe thanks to several people. Beyond Kroeger and Goodman, I would like to thank Kathleen Hale, supervisor for public services at the State Library of Pennsylvania, for hunting up several articles for me. Likewise, allow me to thank Shayna Marie, along with Erika Lorraine and Tamara Cyleste, for doing legwork at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh for me, and to Klenton Willis for putting us together. Also huge thanks to Tara Sullivan and Karin Borgeson for being among my early readers, with tons of feedback. And my friend and audio producer Judith West.
A huge thanks to Gianni La Corte and Giovanna Burzio for their enthusiasm and being the first to shepherd the novel to publication—and for giving it a title!
An enormous, unending, awestruck “Thank you!” to Robert Kauzlaric for his truly incredible work editing this beast. I've been lost in the wilderness for many, many years. To find an editor in one of your best friends, with whom you have shared stages, pages, and living spaces for nearly two decades now, is just magic.
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The soundtrack for this novel has been a nonstop loop of Suzanne Vega, Tori Amos, the Cranberries, and the Sundays, with a dollop of Adele on top. The sole exception is Dirty Bourbon River Show's version of Stephen Foster's Nelly Bly, which is utterly terrific and very un-Foster-y.
For movies, I had the terrific Spotlight running at least once a month, often far more, along with All the President's Men, The Hunger Games series, His Girl Friday, My Man Godfrey, and all the best Maisie Williams episodes of both Game of Thrones and Doctor Who.
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Finally, I have not succumbed to the writerly instinct to add romance where none existed. Bly's relationship with Wilson lasted her whole life, and his. We have her letters to him, which means he kept them. Whereas she burned all her correspondence, presumably to keep any letters she received away from prying eyes.
I did make just one alteration to her letter to him at the end of the book, making it McCain who told her the Q.O. had left the Dispatch, instead of a random character we had never met.
Her relationship with Wilson is too rife with conflict and desire to ignore. He was both father figure and love interest, and their story is almost perfectly Gothic: they are thrown together, they have feelings, but he has an invalid wife, so they remain apart, writing to each other through the decades to come. It's one of those stories too heartbreaking to be anything but real.
But Nellie Bly has many years of adventure ahead of her. Wilson is a part of those years, but so are so many other rich characters, not least of them Cockerill and Pulitzer, who now have a celebrity to exploit. As well as Albert and Mary Jane, who see in the person of Nellie Bly a means to regain the wealth and social status they lost when the Judge died.
Most fantastic of them all is Nellie herself, who has barely begun rocking boats and making a name for herself. The next few years are the richest of her career as a reporter.
I plan a few novelettes covering stories Bly wrote between the fall of 1887 and the summer of 1888. The first is entitled Charity Girl, in which she goes undercover to find out what happens to unwanted babies in New York—a story that would heavily influence the end of her career. In another novelette, Clever Girl, Bly travels to Albany to expose a corrupt lobbyist.
The next full-length novel is entitled Stunt Girl.
Cheers,
DB