Alice Douglas Reading 1900 Australia

Sunday Schools provided access to books that would otherwise have not been available to rural children and teenagers in Australia. These books were largely written in the late nineteenth century by lower middle-class women, the daughters of clerks and grocers in England. The books produced by these writers were hardly sedate or regimented but laced with techniques deriving from the sensation novel, with unreliable narrators and unreliable figures of authority. An examination of one young woman’s reading choices reveals a world characterized by insecurity in identity, danger and uncertainty.