Ella Cheever Thayer

Ella Cheever Thayer (September 14, 1849 – October 28, 1925) was an American playwright and novelist. Born in Maine, she worked as a telegraph operator and published several works in her lifetime, including the hit 1879 novel Wired Love: A Romance in Dots and Dashes.

Biography

She was the daughter of apothecary George Augusta Thayer (1824-1863) and Rachel Ella Cheever Thayer (1823-1907). One sister, Mary Georgie Thayer (1869-1912), was a schoolteacher. Thayer eventually became a telegraph operator at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, who used her experience on the telegraph as the basis for her book Wired Love, A Romance of Dots and Dashes, which became a bestseller for 10 years.

She was also a playwright, having written The Lords of Creation in 1883. Her play is reviewed in the book On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman's Suffrage Movement by Bettina Friedl, published in 1990 (ISBN 1-55553-073-7) and it was one of the first suffragette plays.

She also wrote Amber, a Daughter of Bohemia, a drama in five acts, in 1883. She also wrote short stories for magazines including "The Forgotten Past" in Argosy (January 1897).

Later life and death

She lived in Saugus, Massachusetts. Thayer died of liver cancer; her ashes were placed in Bigelow Chapel, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 1, 1925.