She was the most famous "girl reporter" of her day, a Victorian Brenda Starr.

Nellie Bly exposed political bribery. She got herself committed to New York's infamous Blackwell's Island Women's Lunatic Asylum to expose conditions inside. She raced around the world on steamers and trains in 72 days, beating Jules Verne's fictional Phileas Fogg. There was little she couldn't--and didn't--do. And she did it all with a self-promotional flamboyance that would make Geraldo pale.

But when she died, she faded from memory, living on only for children. There were no fewer than three children's biographies of Bly published in the 1950s and two more in the late 1980s, but no account of her life for adults--until journalist Brooke Kroeger went in search of the real Nellie Bly.

Kroeger became a reporter because she read about Bly when she was a child and realized, "This was something I could do. It sounded so exciting." The memory launched Kroeger into her first book, "Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist," published this month by Times Books.

"I felt that my daughter, Brett, really needed to meet the real-life character who had affected me so deeply," says Kroeger, 45, a former reporter for United Press International and Newsday. "I just thought it was important for her to know what inspired me as a child, what led to her hopscotch childhood as I reported from Brussels, London, Tel Aviv. . . ."

The research spanned 3 1/2 years, leading Kroeger into newspaper morgues, small-town courthouses and to Vienna.

The Bly she found was far more than the muckraking reporter who had inspired her. Kroeger found a self-made and a self-absorbed woman who "acted on whatever passion she felt at the moment" to national applause and her peers' dismay.

She found a compassionate activist who championed working women and found homes for orphans. She found a shameless promoter who endorsed soap and flirted with the mighty.

Nellie Bly would not have wanted to be forgotten. Kroeger did not want journalism to forget the reporter who, while not the first nor the last female journalist of great accomplishment, changed the rules of the game: "Nellie Bly made it possible to play like the boys," Kroeger says.

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\o7 I wonder when they'll send a girl to travel around the sky.

Read the answer in the stars, they wait for Nellie Bly.

--1889 verse\f7

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