Ella Cheever Thayer

Born in Portland, Maine, in 1849, Ella Cheever Thayer worked as a telegraph operator in Boston before becoming a novelist and playwright. That firsthand experience shaped her best-known book, Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (1879), a popular novel about two operators who fall in love through coded messages.

Wired Love stood out for its playful idea of a relationship built through technology, and it remained well known for years after publication. Thayer also wrote for the stage, including The Lords of Creation and Amber, a Daughter of Bohemia, and her dramatic work has been noted in connection with early woman-suffrage theater.

She died in 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts. Today, she is remembered above all for Wired Love, a lively, forward-looking novel that often surprises modern readers with how familiar its long-distance flirtation feels.