Imaginary Worlds and Child Readers at Kurrajong Heights in the 1890s.

While authors of the late 19th century may have been concerned with the production of a masculinist boy, the borrowing patterns of a group of children at a Sunday-school library in Australia show a far more fluid approach to reading and to gender. The children of the emerging Presbyterian middle class at Kurrajong Heights approached their library with imagination and originality. Girls were interested in the practicalities of work and engineering, while boys inhabited more imaginary worlds. There were staggered and overlapping ideas of what it was to be male or female. Borrowing records introduce the complex and confused world of lower middle-class female authors and their influence in making boys and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]