| Ella Cheever Thayer | |
| Birth Date: | September 14, 1849 |
| Birth Place: | Portland, Cumberland County Maine, United States |
| Death Place: | 149 West Canton Street, Boston, Massachusetts, US |
| Occupation: | Novelist Playwright Telegraphist |
| Period: | 1879–1897 |
| Genre: | Fiction |
| Subject: | Romance |
| Movement: | Suffragette |
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.[1]
She was the daughter of apothecary George Augusta Thayer (October 19, 1824 – December 13, 1863) and Rachel Ella Cheever Thayer (October 18, 1823 - May 15, 1907). One sister, Mary Georgie Thayer (October 9, 1869 – March 30, 1912), was a school teacher. Thayer eventually became a telegraph operator[2] at the Brunswick Hotel[3] in Boston, Massachusetts, who used her experience on the telegraph as the basis for her book Wired Love, A Romance of Dots and Dashes,[4] which became a bestseller for 10 years.[5]
She was also a playwright, having written The Lords of Creation[6] 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 and it was one of the first suffragette plays.[7]
She also wrote Amber, a Daughter of Bohemia,[8] a drama in five acts, in 1883. She also wrote short stories for magazines including "The Forgotten Past" in Argosy (January 1897).
She lived in Saugus, Massachusetts.[9] Thayer died of liver cancer; her ashes were placed on November 1, 1925 in Bigelow Chapel, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts.