Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes
1879
This 1879 novel imagines a love story between two telegraph operators who have never met, communicating only through the click and clatter of Morse code. Nathalie Rogers, known as Nattie, works at a small country telegraph office until a mysterious operator known only as 'C' at a distant station begins sending messages that are far too fast, far too clever, and far too flirtatious for mere business. What begins as a test of her professional skills becomes something else entirely: a courtship conducted in dots and dashes, where wit travels faster than feeling, and where two people fall in love with each other's minds before their faces. Thayer wrote this before the telephone existed, making her speculation about love mediated by technology feel almost prophetic. The romance is delightfully combative, full of playful challenges and competitive sparring, yet somehow the dots and dashes carry genuine emotion. It's a love story that asks whether connection can be real when you know only someone's rhythm, their speed, their particular way of tapping code into the wire. The answer, somehow, is yes. For readers who enjoy historical romance, early science fiction, or anyone curious about how humans learned to fall in love through machines.
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“Ah, well! then the young woman was only in advance of the age," said Miss Archer; "and what with that and the telephone, and that dreadful phonograph that bottles up all one says and disgorges at inconvenient times, we will soon be able to do everything by electricity; who knows but some genius will invent something for the especial use of lovers? something, for instance, to carry in their pockets, so when they are far away from each other, and pine for a sound of 'that beloved voice,' they will have only to take up this electrical apparatus, put it to their ears, and be happy. Ah! blissful lovers of the future!””
— Ella Cheever Thayer
“We do not take the lessons our experience teaches us, to heart immediately; first, their bitterness must be overcome.””
— Ella Cheever Thayer
“Not quite polite in Nattie, this. But do not the circumstances plead strongly in her excuse? For, remember, she was not one of those impossible, angelic young ladies of whom we read, but one of the ordinary human beings we meet every day.””
— Ella Cheever Thayer
“One moment," Jo said, detaining her, "may I”
— Ella Cheever Thayer
“Your ambition is great enough to render you useless and discontented, but you need something to stimulate your energy, else it will waste itself in idle dreams. Perhaps””
— Ella Cheever Thayer
“Strange it is, how circumstances alter cases. Coming to the office that morning, Nattie had found it disagreeable and hard enough to buffet the storm, and had growled at herself all the way, because she was not smart enough to get on in the world, even so far as to be able to stay at home in such weather For storms of nature, like storms of life, are hardest to a woman, trammeled as she is in the one by long skirts, that will drag in the mud, and clothes that every gust of wind catches, and in the other by prejudices and impediments of every kind, that the world, in consideration, doubtless, for her so-called "weakness," throws in her way.””
— Ella Cheever Thayer
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Thayer, Ella Cheever. Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. Lex, lex-books.com/book/wired-love-a-romance-of-dots-and-dashes-53fb5584-3c28-4378-a8d0-2d6b5f3b75ad.Thayer, E. C. (1879). Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/wired-love-a-romance-of-dots-and-dashes-53fb5584-3c28-4378-a8d0-2d6b5f3b75adThayer, Ella Cheever. Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/wired-love-a-romance-of-dots-and-dashes-53fb5584-3c28-4378-a8d0-2d6b5f3b75ad.






