The woman who created Mary Poppins spent her life running from her Australian roots.
In short: P. L. Travers is best known for her magical nanny, but her own life was a complex, often difficult story of self-invention. Born Helen Lyndon Goff in Queensland, she transformed herself into an upper-middle-class Englishwoman, disavowing her past while turning her childhood sorrows into a global literary phenomenon.
Born in 1899 in Maryborough, Australia, the future author grew up in a bank manager's residence. Her father, Travers Robert Goff, struggled with alcoholism and died when she was seven, leaving a void she would spend decades processing. As an adult, she viewed her Australian birth as a mistake, eventually moving to England at 24 and adopting the name P. L. Travers. She later described the Mary Poppins books as a form of wishful autobiography, a way to rewrite the childhood she felt she had been denied.
Travers was a multifaceted intellectual, deeply interested in world mythology and occultism. She studied under Carl Gustav Jung and became a disciple of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Her professional life was equally varied, spanning careers as a Shakespearean actress, journalist, and poet. She was notoriously private, once remarking that she identified as 'Anonymous' and questioning the utility of biographies. This guarded nature defined her later years, including her complex relationship with her adopted son, Camillus, whom she raised without revealing his true parentage until he was 17.
Her relationship with Walt Disney was famously contentious. After years of pressure, she sold the film rights to Mary Poppins in 1961, largely due to financial necessity. She deeply disapproved of the 1964 film's softened tone and use of animation, famously clashing with Disney at the premiere. When later approached for a stage musical, she insisted on strict conditions to exclude those involved in the original film. Despite her lifelong ambivalence toward the adaptation, the success of the franchise made her wealthy, and she remained a prolific writer and editor of the myth-focused magazine Parabola until her death in 1996 at age 96.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: P. L. Travers
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