Journalists Rachel Beer and Nellie Bly: Their Legacies Will Now Live On

Two trailblazing female journalists in the UK and USA laid in obscurity for decades despite their outstanding achievements in the last century. Now their legacies are being honoured in a newly-restored gravesite for Rachel Beer (1857-1927), the first woman to edit a British newspaper, two in fact; and a memorial installation for Nellie Bly (1864-1922), the pioneer of investigative journalism.

Until recently, Rachel Beer’s headstone failed to note her remarkable career as editor of both The Sunday Times and The Observer at the end of the twentieth century. Her neglected marker in the Tunbridge Wells Municipal cemetery defined this convention-busting journalist only as the daughter of David Sassoon. Thanks to a campaign led by esteemed journalist Ann Treneman and funding from The Observer and The Sunday Times, Rachel Beer’s monumental role is now engraved on a marker on her newly-restored grave.

Across the ocean in America,  fellow newspaper legend Nellie Bly laid in an unmarked ‘pauper’s’ grave for 56 years until 1978 when the New York Press Club erected a headstone calling her a ‘famous reporter.’  But like Beer’s former epitaph, it is a considerable understatement. A memorial installation paying tribute to her accomplishments is now planned for New York City near the site where investigative journalism was born when Nellie Bly went undercover to expose atrocities inside the women’s insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island. Her accounts, later compiled in a book called Ten Days in a Mad-House, brought about massive reforms.

Although I most admire Bly for her investigative journalism, she is best known for racing around the world in 72 days in 1889-90 – alone with just a Gladstone bag – to beat Phileas Fogg’s fictional 80-day record in Jules Verne’s renowned book. To pay tribute to her, I followed in Nellie Bly’s global footsteps 125 years later. At the end of the journey, I made a pilgrimage to her grave in New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery where I learned that like Beer, she laid in obscurity for decades.

A chapter of my forthcoming book Following Nellie Bly: Her Record-Breaking Race Around the World is devoted to visiting her modest grave. But my next visit to New York will lead me to her memorial designed by artist and sculptor Amanda Matthews of Prometheus Art in Lexington, Kentucky. More than 130 years after her break-through exposés of the asylum, Nellie Bly is returning to Roosevelt Island in a memorial that will celebrate her legacy as a journalist and a humanitarian.
A version of this post first appeared on the Women in Journalism website.