A Private Business: Victorian Erotica

Victorian society, elegant, mannered, and the epitome of restraint, hasn’t a chance where male sex is concerned. Men will have their men, as this collection illustrates in stories such as “Lowering The Sights,” in which a novelist escapes his gentlemanly confines by creating a character so sexually driven that fiction soon becomes fact; “The Summer House Murder,” in which a famous detective, aroused by working his cases, solves a murder while stealing time for sex with his assistant; “Upstairs, Downstairs,” in which a valet who sexually services his employer cannot resist the new man below stairs; and “The Norris Papers,” in which a professor in search of a late poet’s papers finds himself drawn to the man’s partner and ultimately into the poet’s bed.