All three books, are quite erotically charged - do you think our attitudes have changed today towards erotic and pornographic literature or are we as hypocritical and coy as we ever were?
"No, I think we have changed - the very fact that you can get Tipping The Velvet on TV! Our culture is saturated with images of sex, explicit imagery that, in a way, it wouldn't do us any harm to recover a bit of modesty about sex [lots of laughter here!].

"It's one thing to be sexually explicit when you're writing but it's actually quite different to try and be erotic because eroticism depends on being a bit more coy. One of the things I enjoyed about writing 19th century literature is that suddenly I could achieve a lot of impact by just someone taking a glove off or just through a glance. But I think that every era has its own taboos doesn't it..."

In the 19th Century were there any women writers doing what your doing now - who wrote erotic literature for women?
"It's very hard to say…I looked at a lot of 19th century erotica and pornography and I assumed that it was mainly written by men, but one of the things that intrigued me was that we know that women were sometimes involved in the production of pornography and the distribution of pornography. Just as today, the sex industry wasn't run entirely run by men and women did have some interesting footholds in it."

Tell us a little about the new book you're working on?
"Yes, well I've got it on the screen in front of me right now! It's set mainly in the second world war in London but after the war as well. It's new for me in all sorts of ways, most obviously because I've changed the era quite dramatically and partly because I've got a range of characters rather than just one or two central ones and I'm interweaving different people's stories some of them gay and some of them straight - all sorts of stories really and it's just about ordinary people's lives during the war."

Was it difficult to leave the security of the Victorian world that you've known and researched so deeply?
"Yes, it was and whilst I do love 19th century period I felt that I'd gone as far as I could with it for now and felt that I was ready to move on but I hadn't actually anticipated quite how challenging it would be to give all of that up and have to do a whole new set of research about the 40's.

"It’s a different style of book partly intentionally but partly because the feel of the 40's so yes, its been a bit of a voyage into the dark for me in all sorts of ways but it is finally coming together and I'm hoping to finish it this year."

So what for you is the most exciting thing about writing?
"The most exciting thing for me and the thing that I always have to come back to when I'm feeling a bit depressed about it all, is that there's something wonderful about slowly building up in my head this little world. I always think of it as being like a piece of architecture, like building up a tiny sort of cathedral in my head and then actually realizing it on paper so that somebody else can then see it, so that somebody else can then wander round this structure that I've made and see things inside of it.

"That seems to me to be amazing and I feel very lucky - its luxurious to be able to spend my doing that because I think that lots of people are very creative but not everybody has the opportunity in their life to really devote themselves to it and communicate their vision to other people. That for me is the most exciting thing that I'll spend months and months making this thing."

So, flip-side, what's the worst thing?
"There are lots of worst things [laughs] - well sometimes it's lonely, but then I actually quite like that!

"I think that when you're stuck and it doesn't seem to be working, it can just get terribly frustrating and you have to make decisions all the time and I'm haunted by the idea that I might make the wrong decision - that I've chosen the wrong era and the wrong characters and you just have to sort of trust to it really and hopefully it will all come together in the end."

Finally, if you had a magic wand, what would you be doing right now?
"Well…I often speculate as to what I'd do if I won the lottery, then I think 'would I still be writing novels' if I had £10 million and I rather think I wouldn't...[thinks]... but in some ways, I'd hate to be changed in a way that meant that I couldn't write because I do like writing so much…[slight pause] if I could have a magic wand I'd probably just be a better writer...

Tough call, we'd say! And with a wickedly delightful laugh, she was gone...