(no subject)
Nov. 14th, 2013 07:25 amSo you guys remember when I read that book about telegraphy and became really indignant that the world had not provided me with heaps and heaps of telegraph romance!
It turns out there is at least one: Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes, which I would venture to say is probably the most adorable rom-com to be written in 1879.
Wired Love begins with a classic meet-cute, when young telegraph operator (with big dreams!) Nattie accidentally screws up a message she receives from somebody a few stations further down the telegraph line. Pretty soon Nattie and "C" are basically spending all their time at work texting "You're adorable!" "No, YOU'RE adorable!" at each other in Morse Code.
(Of course, since there is no privacy on a telegraph line, every other irritated telegrapher on the stations in between is just like GET OFF THE LINE AND GET A ROOM, UGH. Nattie and C are indeed adorable; nonetheless, I sympathize deeply with all these other telegraphers.)
Besides Nattie and C, there is also a cast of other characters, including:
- Cyn, Nattie's aspiring opera singer BFF, who is WONDERFUL IN ALL WAYS and whom Nattie loves and is also jealous of in the way that you're always jealous of your friends who are achieving awesome things while you feel like you're stuck in place
(Sidenote: a significant theme of this book is about women being ambitious and wanting to achieve awesome things! Not bad for 1879)
- Jo, the Bohemian next door, who buzz-cuts his hair in order not to look like a Romantic poet
- Quimby, hopelessly in love with Nattie and as clumsy as a modern YA heroine, who probably belongs in a Wodehouse novel rather than this book. Sorry, Quimby!
- That Troll At the Telegraph Station Down the Line
Rom-com hijinks rapidly ensue, including several cases of mistaken identity and Big Misunderstandings, but everything turns out all right in the end (well, for everyone except poor Quimby.) There are also several great scenes of people talking secretly together at big parties by tapping out Morse Code with their fingers, and what I believe may be officially the first insinuation of phone sex ever to appear in fiction:
"That any young woman should be so immodest as to establish telegraphic communication between her bed-room and the bed-room of two young men is beyond my comprehension!"
This, from the prim and scandalized landlady, after discovering a ~secret telegraph station~ in Nattie's bedroom. CONGRATS, MISS KLING, you just invented a new genre of porn!
(However, as charming as this book is, it is still not a lesbian telegraph romance, so the field is WIDE OPEN, cough![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
innerbrat cough)
It turns out there is at least one: Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes, which I would venture to say is probably the most adorable rom-com to be written in 1879.
Wired Love begins with a classic meet-cute, when young telegraph operator (with big dreams!) Nattie accidentally screws up a message she receives from somebody a few stations further down the telegraph line. Pretty soon Nattie and "C" are basically spending all their time at work texting "You're adorable!" "No, YOU'RE adorable!" at each other in Morse Code.
(Of course, since there is no privacy on a telegraph line, every other irritated telegrapher on the stations in between is just like GET OFF THE LINE AND GET A ROOM, UGH. Nattie and C are indeed adorable; nonetheless, I sympathize deeply with all these other telegraphers.)
Besides Nattie and C, there is also a cast of other characters, including:
- Cyn, Nattie's aspiring opera singer BFF, who is WONDERFUL IN ALL WAYS and whom Nattie loves and is also jealous of in the way that you're always jealous of your friends who are achieving awesome things while you feel like you're stuck in place
(Sidenote: a significant theme of this book is about women being ambitious and wanting to achieve awesome things! Not bad for 1879)
- Jo, the Bohemian next door, who buzz-cuts his hair in order not to look like a Romantic poet
- Quimby, hopelessly in love with Nattie and as clumsy as a modern YA heroine, who probably belongs in a Wodehouse novel rather than this book. Sorry, Quimby!
- That Troll At the Telegraph Station Down the Line
Rom-com hijinks rapidly ensue, including several cases of mistaken identity and Big Misunderstandings, but everything turns out all right in the end (well, for everyone except poor Quimby.) There are also several great scenes of people talking secretly together at big parties by tapping out Morse Code with their fingers, and what I believe may be officially the first insinuation of phone sex ever to appear in fiction:
"That any young woman should be so immodest as to establish telegraphic communication between her bed-room and the bed-room of two young men is beyond my comprehension!"
This, from the prim and scandalized landlady, after discovering a ~secret telegraph station~ in Nattie's bedroom. CONGRATS, MISS KLING, you just invented a new genre of porn!
(However, as charming as this book is, it is still not a lesbian telegraph romance, so the field is WIDE OPEN, cough
innerbrat cough)
