A short life of the author
P.L. Travers — born Helen Lyndon Goff (9 August 1899 – 23 April 1996) — was an Australian-born British writer and mythologist best known as the creator of Mary Poppins, the magical, vain, stern, and enigmatic nanny who arrives at the Banks family home at 17 Cherry Tree Lane via the East Wind and who has been one of the most beloved characters in children’s literature since her first appearance in 1934. Travers wrote eight Mary Poppins books over six decades, and the character’s cultural footprint — amplified enormously by the 1964 Disney film — is vast. But Travers herself was far more complex and interesting than the cheerful Disney version of her creation might suggest: a mystic, a poet, a student of Gurdjieff, a woman of formidable temperament who guarded her private life fiercely and whose relationship with Walt Disney became one of the most famous author-studio conflicts in literary history.
Life
Travers was born in Maryborough, Queensland, the daughter of a bank manager of Irish descent whose alcoholism and early death profoundly shaped her imaginative life. She later reimagined her father as a heroic figure — a transformation reflected in the Banks father’s journey in the Mary Poppins stories. She grew up in New South Wales, moved to England in 1924, and established herself as a journalist, poet, and theatre critic.
In London, she entered literary and intellectual circles and became a devotee of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the charismatic spiritual teacher whose influence on her thinking was deep and lasting. She also studied with the Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki and was profoundly interested in myth, folklore, and the archetypal patterns underlying fairy tales and religious narratives. She wrote extensively about these interests, particularly in essays collected in What the Bee Knows (1989).
In 1939, she adopted Camillus Hone, one of a pair of Irish twins, without telling the birth family about his twin brother. The brothers were reunited by chance seventeen years later — an event that caused lasting pain. Travers never married and was intensely private about her personal life.
Mary Poppins (1934)
The first Mary Poppins book introduces the character who arrives with the East Wind at the Banks household and departs when the wind changes. Mary Poppins is not the warm, nurturing figure of the Disney film: she is vain, sharp-tongued, mysterious, and capable of extraordinary magic that she flatly denies performing. She takes the children on adventures that involve mythological and cosmic dimensions — conversations with starlings, visits to constellations, encounters with figures from fairy tales — but meets every inquiry about these experiences with icy disdain.
Travers insisted that the books were not “for children” but about the relationship between the child’s perception of the world — magical, animistic, unified — and the adult’s loss of that perception. The stories are saturated with mythological references that reflect Travers’s study of Gurdjieff, Sufism, Zen Buddhism, and comparative mythology.
The subsequent books — Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), Mary Poppins in the Park (1952), and later volumes — deepen and extend the mythology.
The Disney Conflict
Walt Disney pursued the film rights to Mary Poppins for twenty years before Travers finally relented in the early 1960s. She extracted a contractual right of script approval — and then spent the production process in a state of near-continuous objection. She disliked the animation sequences, the songs (she was particularly hostile to Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent), and the sentimentalisation of her character. She wept at the premiere — not, she said, from happiness.
The 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks, starring Emma Thompson as Travers and Tom Hanks as Disney, dramatised this conflict, though Travers’s estate objected to its portrayal of her. The film, ironically, did exactly what Travers had always feared Disney would do: it turned her complex, difficult story into a heartwarming narrative with a happy ending.
Critical Standing
Travers is taken seriously by scholars of children’s literature and mythology, though her reputation among general readers is inseparable from Disney. The Mary Poppins books, read without the film’s influence, are stranger, darker, and more intellectually ambitious than most people expect. They belong to a tradition of English children’s literature — alongside Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and C.S. Lewis — that uses fantasy to explore metaphysical questions.
Collecting Travers
Mary Poppins (1934, Gerald Howe, London) in first edition with the Mary Shepard illustrations and dust jacket is rare and highly sought, bringing $3,000–$15,000. American first edition (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934) brings $500–$2,000. Subsequent Mary Poppins titles in first edition bring $100–$500. Signed copies are scarce; Travers was not a frequent signer.