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Summary
Summary
Work for a New York newspaper
Fall in love
Marry a millionaire
Change the world
Young Nellie Bly had ambitious goals, especially for a woman at the end of the nineteenth century, when the few female journalists were relegated to writing columns about cleaning or fashion. But fresh off a train from Pittsburgh, Nellie knew she was destined for more and pulled a major journalistic stunt that skyrocketed her to fame- feigning insanity, being committed to the notorious asylum on Blackwell's Island, and writing a shocking expose of the clinic's horrific treatment of its patients.
Nellie Bly became a household name as the world followed her enthralling career in "stunt" journalism that raised awareness of political corruption, poverty, and abuses of human rights. Leading an uncommonly full life, Nellie circled the globe in a record seventy-two days and brought home a pet monkey before marrying an aged millionaire and running his company after his death.
With its sensational (and true!) plot, Ten Days a Madwoman dares its readers to live as boldly as its remarkable heroine.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers meet Elizabeth Jane Cochran (aka Nellie Bly) on the eve of her illustrious journalism career in the opening pages of Noyes's (Plague in the Mirror) biography. Over 13 chapters, this story of the innovative, bootstrapping Bly reveals her many juxtaposed traits ("as frivolous as she was socially earnest, as funny and self-deprecating as she was proud and haughty" writes Noyes in a closing note). The winding narrative initially focuses on Bly's undercover work, getting committed to a New York City asylum and reporting on its appalling conditions, then recounts her other accomplishments, including circumnavigating the globe in fewer than 80 days and other stunt-style assignments, many of which championed the socially downtrodden. Numerous sidebars and interspersed spreads explore Bly's childhood and other topics, but while these frequent diversions provide useful context, they are also distracting, forcing shifts in readers' attention every few pages. Still, Noyes's thoroughly researched account, with archival photos and myriad quotes from Bly's own work, offers a well-rounded look at a self-possessed women who was nothing if not resilient. Ages 10-up. Agent: Jill Grinberg, Jill Grinberg Literary Management. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
With a title ripped from the headlines of Joseph Pulitzers late-nineteenth-century New York World, Noyes invites readers into the life and times of legendary journalist Nellie Bly. When Bly arrives in New York in 1887, shes unprepared for sexist rejection at the major papers. Determined to make her journalistic mark and desperate for money, she accepts an assignment at the World to go undercover inside the lunatic asylum on Blackwells Island and subsequently report on conditions there. Noyes smartly uses this hook to engage readers, enriching this and other Bly experiences (such as her famous around-the-world race) with well-placed sidebars that explore the social conditions of poor women, the early years of big newspapers, and flashbacks to Blys childhood. Clips from her articles give readers a glimpse of Blys direct writing style, her ways of engaging an audience, her personal involvement, and her straightforward vocabulary (which contrasts dramatically with the purple prose of the articles headlines). More than a stunt reporter, Bly was later in life able to effect change on behalf of the working poor through her own business ventures. Part chronological, part expository, the narrative, in its selection and placement of incidents, allows readers to become investigators, to form opinions and then discover more information that may support or contradict their previous ideas about this complicated woman. This strong biography concludes with an authors note, source notes, a web- and bibliography, further reading recommendations, and (unseen) picture credits and index. betty carter (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
In 1887, Nellie Bly left Pittsburgh for New York City to find fame as a journalist. Initially, what she found was poverty and rejection. But what Nellie Bly lacked in education and opportunities, she made up for in courage and determination. Soon she made her mark by becoming an inmate at the infamous insane asylum on Blackwell's Island and reporting on the harrowing conditions there. Next came her around-the-world journey, which brought worldwide recognition. Noyes details these two important experiences and describes others in a well-researched biography that includes copious quotes from Bly and her contemporaries. While the book focuses on Bly as an adult, one-, two-, and four-page features appearing throughout the book offer information on related topics and sometimes fill in facts about her early years. Readers will also learn about Bly's era, particularly the difficulties faced by a woman attempting to support herself and her family. Many period photos and prints illustrate the text. A good, readable introduction to a fascinating vanguard.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2015 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6 Up-Daring? Turbulent? Madwoman? When a book's title includes those words, readers are bound to be inspired to open it. When the book is as well done as this one is, readers will stay through the last page. About half of the narrative is devoted to the 10 days that journalist Nellie Bly spent undercover in an asylum for mentally ill women (and women who were put there unjustly by their families). Given the high drama of these real-life events, the author's matter-of-fact writing style keeps the narrative from veering toward sensationalism. Passages from Bly's newspaper article about the experience are threaded into the narrative, thereby keeping her vibrant viewpoint as the dramatic center. The rest of the volume covers Bly's other exploits, personal and professional: her venture around the world in a record-breaking 72 days, her interview with imprisoned anarchist Emma Goldman, and her own marriage at 31 to septuagenarian millionaire Robert Seaman. The illustrations are a mix of straightforward archival photos and surreal retouched photos à la Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Quirk, 2011). Because the former are captioned with historical facts and the latter are not captioned at all, it is easy to tell the difference between the actual images and the fanciful. Noyes makes history accessible and irresistible in this thrilling account of women's lives, flagrant abuse, scandal, courage, and tenacity. The source notes are extensive, and the research is impeccable. VERDICT This excellent work is a natural fit for units on history, biography, and social studies.-Jennifer Prince, Buncombe County Public Libraries, NC © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
As the title implies, this biography focuses largely on reporter Nellie Bly's 10 grim days in a New York City insane asylum for women in 1887, which influenced public opinion and gained her instant celebrity. Bly's famous 1889 trip around the world, inspired by the Jules Verne novel and followed closely by thousands of newspaper readers, is covered in less detail but with plenty of pizzazz. The brisk narrative draws from Bly's own writings and from biographies, skillfully incorporating quotations, dialogue, and well-chosen facts. The overall tone is admiring, but the balanced text also acknowledges criticism of her kind of "stunt" reporting and touches briefly on problems in her personal life. While Bly's work life is presented chronologically, her earlier years are spread out in a disjointed manner in sidebars throughout the book. These and other double-page sidebars are embedded in the middles of chapters, often disrupting the smooth flow of the story. Plentiful black-and-white photographs, cartoons, newspaper pages, and artifacts expand the sense of time and place. Noyes sets Bly's life and career in context, especially with regard to limitations on women and condescending attitudes toward their abilities. A lively biography that reflects the spirit of the intrepid reporter. (author's note, source notes, bibliography, index) (Biography. 11-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1: The Gods of Gotham When the ambitious young reporter Elizabeth Jane "Pink" Cochran--known to her readers as Nellie Bly--left her life and family behind in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she was confident one of New York City's major daily newspapers would hire her at once. She had spunk. She had experience. She was fearless and eager to learn. And she was wrong. Nellie left her mother, Mary Jane, behind in Pittsburgh on a May day in 1887, promising to send for her when she found steady work. She stepped up onto a train and later stepped down into the most populous city in the nation wearing a flowered hat she had bought while reporting in Mexico. Like thousands of other young hopefuls, twenty-three-year-old Nellie Bly was on her own for the first time in her life. She rented a tiny furnished room overlooking an alley on West Ninety-Sixth Street. Her lodgings were in the northernmost part of settled Manhattan, where Broadway became Western Boulevard, and the "boulevard" wasn't paved yet. Goats wandered through, nibbling weeds in vacant lots between squat houses. It was about as far from where Nellie needed to be every day as it could get. Her destination was Park Row, also known as Newspaper Row, a street slanting northeast from lower Broadway where newspaper offices hunkered along one side near City Hall. The trek downtown each day was epic. Nellie rode a steam locomotive a half hour south on the Ninth Avenue Elevated Railway. Then she walked east on streets where people lived grimly packed together in tenements (and were often "roasted," as newspaper reports of the day liked to put it, in devastating blazes). Typhus, cholera, and influenza swept through the area at regular intervals. Gambling dens and bordellos thrived while the police looked the other way. Robbery and murder were commonplace, keeping city reporters on their toes. The streets were a hazard in their own right. One of thousands of horses hauling the city's carts, carriages, hansom cabs, omnibuses, and streetcars might bolt at any moment, their transports careening into bystanders. Nellie pounded the Park Row pavement in vain. The gatekeepers at the Tribune , the Times , the Sun , the World , the Herald , and the Mail and Express , who turned away aspiring reporters every day, were unimpressed by her Pittsburgh portfolio. To scrape by that first summer in New York, Nellie wrote freelance articles for her old newspaper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch , where she had made her start and a (literal) name for herself. They were the sort of Sunday style stories she hated, about the rage for puffed sleeves among fashionable New York women, for example. Around the time that her money and patience were beginning to run out, the Dispatch forwarded a letter from a young Pittsburgh woman . An aspiring journalist wanted Nellie's advice: Was New York the place to get a start? Could a woman writer make her mark there? Nellie must have wanted to laugh out loud at the irony. But then an idea struck. What if she called on the editors of New York's six most influential newspapers, on behalf of the Dispatch , to harvest their thoughts on this very subject? She would "obtain the opinion of the newspaper gods of Gotham" and, at the same time, gain audience with the men who held her future in their ink-stained hands. The first paper she visited was the Sun . As she climbed the dim spiral staircase to the third-floor newsroom with its haze of cigar smoke and raucous conversation, anxious office boys darted here and there on errands. In the summer heat, men would have removed their suit coats and vests, working in sweat-stained white shirts with high celluloid collars and rolled sleeves. Her entrance must have caused a stir. Female reporters were still comparatively rare, even in big cities like New York and Pittsburgh--Nellie proved the exception to this and other rules--and there were likely no other women in the newsroom that day when she was escorted into the office of the paper's formidable editor and publisher, Charles A. Dana. Between his reputation for hiring college men and his flowing Father Time beard--backed by a stuffed owl looking down from a shelf of reference books--Dana must have cut an imposing figure to a hungry "girl reporter." But after flushing out his stance on the topic with a few questions, Nellie asked, boldly, "Are you opposed to women as journalists, Mr. Dana?" Certainly not, he objected. But "while a woman might be ever so clever in obtaining news and putting it into words," he said, "we would not feel at liberty to call her out at one o'clock in the morning to report at a fire or a crime. . . . [w]e never hesitate with a man." Women also, he maintained, "find it impossible not to exaggerate." Nellie soldiered on: "How do women secure positions in New York?" She thought she saw a twinkle in his eye as he replied, "I really cannot say." Nellie continued along Park Row with her questions. The editor of the Herald informed Nellie that for better or worse the public wanted scandal and sensation, "and a gentleman could not in delicacy ask a woman to have anything to do with that class of news." The Times editor had never felt compelled to take up the topic with his colleagues. Mr. Coates of the Mail and Express called women "invaluable." The way they dressed and their "constitution" ruled out hard reporting, but they were ideally equipped to cover stories on society, fashion, and gossip. Women were "more ambitious than men," the editor at the Telegram echoed, "and had more energy," but he "couldn't very well send a woman out on a story where she might have to slide down a banister. . . . That's where a man gets the best of her." At the New York World , Colonel John Cockerill complained that women didn't want to write the fashion and society stories they were best fit for. "A man is of far greater service," he said in his forthright way, though he also claimed to have a couple of women on staff. "So you see, we do not object personally." After weighing the words of these six powerful men, Nellie summed up their views: "We have more women now than we want. . . . Women are no good, anyway." Her article, "Women Journalists," traveled out from Pittsburgh to New York and Boston and received notice in The Journalist , a national trade magazine. Her choice of subject matter was brilliant strategy: it put Nellie Bly in the right place at almost the right time. Her moment was coming. But she had to hit rock bottom first. Excerpted from Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original Girl Reporter Nellie Bly by Deborah Noyes All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
1 The Gods of Gotham | p. 1 |
2 More Than Anyone Would Believe | p. 9 |
3 Strange Ambition | p. 17 |
4 You Won't Get Out in a Hurry | p. 27 |
5 Into the Madhouse | p. 39 |
6 She Who Enters Hero | p. 51 |
7 After an Item | p. 61 |
8 Stunts and More Stunts | p. 67 |
9 Around the World | p. 73 |
10 Sightseeing (and Other Inconveniences) | p. 81 |
11 Father Time Outdone | p. 89 |
12 Industries of Magnitude | p. 101 |
13 Good Fights Well Fought | p. 115 |
Author's Note | p. 120 |
Source Note | p. 123 |
Bibliography | p. 129 |
Acknowledgments | p. 131 |
Picture Credits | p. 132 |
Index | p. 133 |