Perseus Academic: Age of Arousal by Linda Griffiths

It's a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It's 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way. Miss Mary Barfoot runs a school for secretaries with her young lover, Miss Rhoda Nunn. But when the Misses Madden spinsters Virginia and Alice and beautiful young Monica arrive, along with the attractive Dr. Everard Barfoot, things can never be the same.

Age of Arousal is a lavish, sexy, frenetic ensemble piece about the forbidden and gloriously liberated self genre-busting, rule-bending, and ambitiously original.