Elizabeth Bisland Whetmore

Elizabeth Bisland Whetmore (February 11, 1861 – January 6, 1929) was an American writer and traveler, best known for her around-the-world race against Nellie Bly in 1889-1890. Bisland Whetmore was a poet, columnist, biographer, essayist and novelist. Throughout her lifetime, she published all of her works as Elizabeth Bisland.

Quotes

 * To the masculine mind there appears to be something strangely exhilarating in the thought of a woman being abruptly torn from her home without sufficient time to put her wardrobe in order, and to all the men responsible for this voyage the most delightful feature apparently of the whole affair was the fact that I should be forced to get ready in five hours for a seventy-five days' voyage around the world.
 * Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World
 * Even in my childhood my sympathy for the heroes in the fairy tales was always keenest at the moment when they waved their hands in farewell and turned their faces at last towards the magical adventures that stalked about impatiently awaiting their advent in the strange countries where their havens lay.
 * Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World
 * It was well to have thus once really lived.
 * Referenced in The Public Domain Review


 * The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them – or wished to see them... No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life.
 * On men and women, A Candle of Understanding.


 * [Perhaps] the potency of fever, of drugs, of alcohol, or of mania may open up deeps of memory, of primordial memory, that are closed to the milder magic of sleep. The subtle poison in the grape may gnaw through the walls of Time and give the memory sight of those terrible days when we wallowed — nameless shapes — in the primaeval slime.
 * Dreams and Their Mysteries.


 * No ruler is ever really dethroned by his subjects. No hand but his own ever takes the crown from his head... When he ceases to lead... the revolt which casts him from power is only the outward manifestation of his previous abdication.
 * The Abdication of Man (1898), p. 195.


 * Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible... one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry.
 * On old age, The Truth About Men and Other Matters.