It would be dreadfully unromantic to fall in love with a soiled invisible

Via Clive Thompson and Boing Boing: Wired Love, a novel about an online office romance. Or rather an on-the-wire romance, because the novel was written in 1880 and its heroine, Nattie, is a telegraph operator. There's also some references to faxes (in development at the time), and when one character suggests it would great if people could just carry around some pocket deice that would enable voice communication I began to suspect I was reading a literary hoax; but if it is then the author, Ella Cheever Thayer, has a fake wikipedia biography and does the best imitation of 1880s American dialogue I've ever read.

She's also strikingly modern in that her cast consists mostly of young single men and women *not* living with their parents (they all live in the same building with one of two contrasting landladies), another new social trend of the time, although not one commented upon directly in the text.

All this makes it a bit disappointing that the second half does suffer somewhat from the rom-com cliche of "complications that could be resolved in ten seconds if the characters would just communicate":

"Hey -- I've been wondering -- my snoopy landlady says you and my hot opera-singer friend are in love. Is that true? I mean, it's ok if--"

"What?! No we're not. She's cool and all, but I'm in love with you."

"Aw."

"<3"

"<3 Say, good thing I asked instead of just breaking up with you with no explanation."