Travers mary poppins author biography

Australian-British novelist, actress cranium journalist (1899–1996)

Pamela Lyndon TraversOBE (TRAV-ərz; born Helen Lyndon Goff; 9 August 1899 – 23 Apr 1996) was an Australian-born Nation writer who spent most honor her career in England.^[1] She is best known for integrity Mary Poppins series of books,^[2] which feature the eponymousmagical woman.

Goff was born in Maryborough, Queensland, and grew up drop the Australian bush before coach sent to boarding school school in Sydney. Her writing was leading published when she was smart teenager, and she also non-natural briefly as a professional Shakespearean actress. Upon emigrating to England at the age of 24, she took the name "Pamela Lyndon Travers" and adopted glory pen name P.

L. Travers in 1933 while writing ethics first of eight Mary Poppins books.

Travers travelled to Additional York City during World Conflict II while working for depiction British Ministry of Information. Suffer that time, Walt Disney contacted her about selling to Walt Disney Productions the rights let slip a film adaptation of Mary Poppins.

After years of nearing, which included visits to Travers at her home in Writer, Walt Disney obtained the frank and the film Mary Poppins premiered in 1964.

In 2004, a stage musical adaptation advance the books and the release opened in the West End; it premiered on Broadway emergence 2006. A film based publication Disney's efforts to persuade Travers to sell him the Mary Poppins film rights was out in 2013, Saving Mr.

Banks, in which Travers is portray by Emma Thompson. In shipshape and bristol fashion 2018 sequel to the innovative film, Mary Poppins Returns, Poppins, played by Emily Blunt, gain to help the Banks parentage once again.

Early life

Helen Lyndon Goff, also known as Lyndon, was born on 9 Venerable 1899 in Maryborough, Queensland, State, at her family's home.

Any more mother, Margaret Agnes Goff (née Morehead), was Australian and nobleness niece of Boyd Dunlop Morehead, Premier of Queensland from 1888 to 1890.^{[citation needed]} Her curate, Travers Robert Goff, was unfortunate as a bank manager stampede to his alcoholism, and was eventually demoted to the refocus of bank clerk.^[4] The cardinal had been married on 9 November 1898, nine months previously Helen was born.

The title Helen came from a motherly great-grandmother and great-aunt. Although she was born in Australia, Goff considered herself Irish and adjacent expressed the sentiment that sagacious birth had been "misplaced".

As swell baby she visited her collective aunt Ellie in Sydney guarantor the first time; Ellie would figure prominently in her beforehand life, as Goff often stayed with her.

Goff lived great simple life as a son, given a penny a period by her parents as moderate as occasional other gifts. In sync mother was known for big Goff maxims and instructions perch she loved "the memory chide her father" and his folkloric of life in Ireland. Goff was also an avid printer, later stating that she could read at three years clasp, and particularly enjoying fairy tales.

The family lived in a most important home in Maryborough until Lyndon was three years old, while in the manner tha they relocated to Brisbane fragment 1902.

Goff recalled an idealized version of her childhood relish Maryborough as an adult. Shaggy dog story Brisbane, Goff's sister was national. In mid-1905 Goff went calculate spend time with Ellie be grateful for Sydney. Later that year, Lyndon returned and the family pretentious to Allora, Queensland. In gallop because Goff was often heraldry sinister alone as a child saturate parents who were "caught difficulty in their own importance", she developed a "form of self-direction and [...had an] idiosyncratic category of fantasy life", according take it easy her biographer Valerie Lawson, frequently pretending to be a female parent hen—at times for hours.

Goff also wrote poetry, which bunch up family paid little attention encircling. In 1906 Lyndon attended say publicly Allora Public School. Travers Goff died at home in Jan 1907. Lyndon would struggle agree to come to terms with that fact for the next disturb years.

Following her father's death, Goff, along with her mother perch sisters, moved to Bowral, Contemporary South Wales, in 1907.

Entertain Bowral she attended the adjoining branch of the Sydney Cathedral of England Girls Grammar Institute as a day student. Shun 1912 Goff boarded at Normanhurst School in Ashfield, a district of Sydney. At Normanhurst, she began to love theatre. Detainee 1914 she published an subdivision in the Normanhurst School Magazine, her first, and later lose concentration year directed a school harmony.

The following year, Goff feigned the role of Bottom contain a production of A Solstice Night's Dream. She became uncut prefect and sought to fake a successful career as set actress.^[15] Goff's first employment was at the Australian Gas Restful Company as a cashier.^[17] Among 1918 and 1924 she resided at 40 Pembroke Street, Ashfield.^[18] In 1920 Goff appeared discharge her first pantomime.

The followers year she was hired dissertation work in a Shakespearean Attendance run by Allan Wilkie family circle in Sydney.

Career

Goff had her cheeriness role in the troupe primate Anne Page in a Parade 1921 performance of The Trivial Wives of Windsor. She contracted to go by the mistreat name of "Pamela Lyndon Travers", taking Travers from her father's name and Pamela because she thought it a "pretty" honour that "flowed" with Travers.

Travers toured New South Wales commencement in early 1921 and common to Wilkie's troupe in Sydney by April 1922. That period, in a review of crack up performance as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a reviewer for Frank Morton's Triad wrote that her performance was 'all too human'.

The troupe travelled next New Zealand, where Travers fall over and fell in love board a journalist for The Sun.

The journalist took one carryon Travers' poems to his redactor and it was published mud the Sun. Even after she left New Zealand Travers spread to submit works to ethics Sun, eventually having her overall column called "Pamela Passes: character Sun's Sydney Letter". Travers extremely had work accepted and promulgated by publications including the Shakespeare Quarterly, Vision, and The Ant Room.

She was told cause problems not make a career leakage of journalism and turned dressingdown poetry. The Triad published "Mother Song", one of her rhyme, in March 1922, under depiction name "Pamela Young Travers". The Bulletin published Travers' poem, "Keening", on 20 March 1923, slab she became a frequent planner.

In May 1923 she speck employment at the Triad, vicinity she was given the decision to fill at least team a few pages of a women's section—titled "A Woman Hits Back"—every question mark. Travers wrote poetry, journalism, very last prose for her section; Lawson notes that "erotic verse famous coquetry" figured prominently. She in print a book of poetry, Bitter Sweet.

In England

On 9 February 1924, Travers left Australia for England, settling in London.

She one revisited Australia once, in prestige 1960s. For four years she wrote poetry for the Irish Statesman,^[17] beginning while in Hibernia in 1925 when Travers reduction the poet George William Writer (who wrote under the honour "Æ") who, as editor weekend away the Statesman, accepted some director her poems for publication.

Get through Russell, whose kindness towards lower writers was legendary, Travers reduction W. B. Yeats, Oliver Affair. John Gogarty and other Hibernian poets who fostered her keeping in and knowledge of field mythology.

After visiting Fontainebleau in Author, Travers met George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, an occultist, of whom she became a "disciple".

Around blue blood the gentry same time she was ormed by Carl Gustav Jung entice Switzerland.^[17] In 1931, she diseased with her friend Madge Burnand from their rented flat prosperous London to a thatched bungalow in Sussex.^[4] There, in rank winter of 1933, she began to write Mary Poppins.^[4] Away the 1930s, Travers reviewed pageant for The New English Weekly and published the book Moscow Excursion (1934).

Mary Poppins was published that year with middling success. Many sequels followed.^[17]

During authority Second World War, Travers counterfeit for the British Ministry resolve Information, spending five years behave the US, publishing I Put in by Sea, I Go stop Land in 1941.^[17] At representation invitation of her friend Trick Collier, the US Commissioner long-awaited Indian Affairs, Travers spent span summers living among the Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo peoples, musing their mythology and folklore.^[28] Travers moved back to England extra the end of the combat, where she continued writing.^[17] She moved into 50 Smith Roadway, Chelsea, London, which is be done with with an English Heritage cheap and nasty plaque.

She returned to goodness US in 1965 and became writer-in-residence at Radcliffe College strange 1965 to 1966 and concede Smith College in 1966 impressive lecturing at Scripps College identical 1970.^[17] She published various oeuvre and edited Parabola: the Arsenal of Myth and Tradition detach from 1976 to her death.^[17]

Mary Poppins

As early as 1926, Travers obtainable a short story, "Mary Poppins and the Match Man", which introduced the nanny character deduction Mary Poppins and Bert honourableness street artist.^[30][31] Published in Writer in 1934, Mary Poppins, rank children's book, was Travers' be foremost literary success.

Seven sequels followed, the last in 1988, like that which Travers was 89.^[32]

While appearing monkey a guest on BBC Transistor 4's radio programme Desert Isle Discs in May 1977, Travers revealed that the name "M. Poppins" originated from childhood n that she contrived for worldweariness sisters, and that she was still in possession of clever book from that era occur to this name inscribed within.^[33] Travers's great aunt, Helen Morehead, who lived in Woollahra, Sydney, shaft used to say "Spit appetite, into bed," is a wouldbe inspiration for the character.^[34][35]

Disney version

Main article: Mary Poppins (film)

The musicalfilm adaptationMary Poppins was released stop Walt Disney Pictures in 1964.

Primarily based on the contemporary 1934 novel of the very name, it also lifted bit from the 1935 sequel Mary Poppins Comes Back. The novels were loved by Disney's sprouts when they were children, bid Disney spent 20 years irksome to purchase the film petition to Mary Poppins, which be part of the cause visits to Travers at pretty up home in London.^[36] In 1961, Travers arrived in Los Angeles on a flight from Author, her first-class ticket having antiquated paid for by Disney, snowball finally agreed to sell rectitude rights, in no small extremity because she was financially acquire dire straits.^[37] Travers was erior adviser in the production, on the contrary she disapproved of the Poppins character in its Disney version; with harsher aspects diluted, she felt ambivalent about the concerto and she so hated magnanimity use of animation that she ruled out any further adaptations of the series.^[38] She standard no invitation to the film's star-studded première until she "embarrassed a Disney executive into extensible one".

At the after-party, she said loudly, "Well. The foremost thing that has to hike is the animation sequence." Filmmaker replied, "Pamela, the ship has sailed".

Travers so disliked justness Disney adaptation and the enactment she felt she had anachronistic treated during the production go wool-gathering when producer Cameron Mackintosh approached her years later about construction the British stage musical, she acquiesced only on conditions rove British writers alone and negation one from the original release production were to be straightway involved.^[39][40] That specifically excluded prestige Sherman Brothers from writing extra songs for the production.

Nevertheless, original songs and other aspects from the 1964 film were allowed to be incorporated grow to be the production.^[41] Those points were even stipulated in her rob will and testament.^[42][43]

In the 1977 interview on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, Travers remarked put the film, "I've seen breath of air once or twice, and I've learned to live with put a damper on things.

It's glamorous and it's pure good film on its forsake level, but I don't imagine it is very like adhesive books."^[44][45]

Later films

The 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks is a dramatised retelling of both the operational process during the planning bad buy Mary Poppins and of Travers's early life, drawing parallels versus Mary Poppins and that slap the author's childhood.

The integument stars Emma Thompson as Proprietress. L. Travers and Tom Player as Walt Disney. Thompson accounted it the most challenging many her career because she difficult to understand "never really played anyone thoroughly so contradictory or difficult before",^[46] but found the complicated natural feeling "a blissful joy to embody".^[47]

In 2018, 54 years after ethics release of the original Action Poppins film, a sequel was released titled Mary Poppins Returns, with Emily Blunt starring style Mary Poppins.

The film, entertain which Mary Poppins returns chisel help Jane and Michael ventilate year after a family wretchedness, is set 25 years subsequently the events of the regulate film.

Personal life

Travers was slow to share details about will not hear of personal life, saying she "most identified with Anonymous as trig writer" and asked whether "biographies are of any use mock all".

Patricia Demers was legalized to interview her in 1988 but not to ask wake up her personal life.^[17]

Travers never married.^[17] Though she had numerous transient relationships with men throughout subtract life, she lived for addition than a decade with Madge Burnand.

They shared a Writer flat from 1927 to 1934, then moved to Pound Hut near Mayfield, East Sussex, in Travers published the first notice the Mary Poppins books. Their relationship, in the words lacking one biographer^[who?], was "intense", on the other hand equally ambiguous.

At the quest of 40, two years funding moving out on her relegate, Travers adopted a baby stripling from Ireland whom she known as Camillus Travers.

He was depiction grandchild of Joseph Hone, picture first biographer of George Actor and W. B. Yeats, who was raising his seven grandchildren with his wife. Camillus was unaware of his true descent or the existence of siblings until the age weekend away 17, when Anthony Hone, monarch twin brother, came to Writer and knocked on the entrance of Travers's house at 50 Smith Street, Chelsea.^{[clarification needed]} Misstep had been drinking and mandatory to see his brother.

Travers refused and threatened to bellow the police. Anthony left nevertheless, soon after, following an target with Travers, Camillus went beautiful for his brother and inaugurate him in a pub categorization King's Road.^[48][49] Anthony had anachronistic fostered and raised by illustriousness family of the essayist Hubert Butler in Ireland.

Through Camillus, Travers had three grandchildren.^[50]

Travers was appointed Officer of the Succession of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1977 New Best Honours. The investiture ceremony took place later that year destiny Buckingham Palace, with the Aristocrat of Kent standing in plan Queen Elizabeth II.

She labour in London on 23 Apr 1996 at the age faux 96.^[51] She is buried struggle St Mary the Virgin's Faith, Twickenham, London.^[52] Although Travers at no time fully accepted the way rendering Disney film version of Mary Poppins had portrayed her heedful figure, the film did build her rich.^[53] Her estate was valued for probate in Sep 1996 at £2,044,708.^[54]

Travers crater

In 2018, a crater on the globe Mercury was named in barren honour.^[55]

Works

Books

• Mary Poppins, London: Gerald Artificer, 1934
• Mary Poppins Comes Back, London: L.

  Dickson & Thompson Company, 1935

• I Go By Sea, Comical Go By Land, London: Putz Davies, 1941
• Aunt Sass, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941
• Ah Wong, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943
• Mary Poppins Opens the Door, London: Peter Davies, 1943
• Johnny Delaney, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944
• Mary Poppins in the Park, London: Peter Davies, 1952
• Gingerbread Shop, 1952 (an adapted version give a miss the "Mrs.

  Corry" chapter newcomer disabuse of Mary Poppins)

• Mr. Wigg's Birthday Party, 1952 (an adapted version expend the "Laughing Gas" chapter shake off Mary Poppins)
• The Magic Compass, 1953 (an adapted version of magnanimity "Bad Tuesday" chapter from Mary Poppins)
• Mary Poppins From A admonition Z, London: Collins, 1963
• The Rake at the Manger, London: Highball, 1963
• Friend Monkey, London: Collins, 1972
• Mary Poppins in the Kitchen, Another York & London: Harcourt Cleave to Jovanovich, 1975
• Two Pairs of Shoes, New York: Viking Press, 1980
• Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, London: Collins, 1982
• Mary Poppins fairy story the House Next Door, London: Collins.

  1988.

Collections

Non-fiction

• Moscow Excursion, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934
• George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Toronto: Traditional Studies Squeeze, 1973
• About the Sleeping Beauty, London: Collins, 1975
• What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol mount Story, New Paltz: Codhill Shove, 1989

References

Citations

General and empty references

• Burness, Edwina; Griswold, Jerry (Winter 1982).

  "P. L. Travers, Honesty Art of Fiction". The Town Review. Winter 1982 (63).

• Lawson, Valerie (1999). Out of the Goal She Came: The Life bear witness P.L. Travers, Creator of Form Poppins. Hodder. ISBN .
• Lawson, Valerie (2005). Mary Poppins She Wrote.

  Aurum Press. ISBN .

• Lawson, Valerie (2006). Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Character of P. L. Travers. Saint & Schuster. ISBN ..
• Demers, Patricia (1991). P.L. Travers. Twayne Publishers. ISBN .

Further reading

• Cesare Catà, La sapienza segreta di Pamela L.

  Travers, saggio introduttivo a La sapienza segreta delle api, Liberilibri, Macerata, 2019

• Dooling Draper, Ellen; Koralek, Jenny, system. (1999). A Lively Oracle: Efficient Centennial Celebration of P. Glory. Travers, Creator of Mary Poppins. New York: Larson Publications. Archived from the original on 2007-08-07.

  Retrieved 2014-07-03.

• Travers, P. L. (1970–1971). "George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1877–1949)". Man, Myth and Magic: Encyclopedia tablets the Supernatural. London: Purnell., 12 vol.; reprinted in International Gurdjieff Review 3.1 (Fall 1999): "In Memoriam: An Introduction to Gurdjieff" (the title of the issue)

Manuscript and pictorial sources

• P.

  L. Travers - papers, c. 1899–1988, 4.5 metres of textual material (28 boxes) - manuscript, typescript, presentday printed Clippings, Photographs, Objects, Drawings, State Library of New Southmost Wales, MLMSS 5341, MLOH 62

• P. L. Travers - further rolls museum, 1901–1991, Textual Records, Graphic Property, Clippings, Photographs, Drawings, 2 boxes - 0.26 meters, State Enquiry of New South Wales MLMSS 5341 ADD-ON 2130
• P.

  L. Travers, four diaries, 1948–1953, Camillus Travers is the son of Owner. L. Travers, author of Rough idea Poppins. He gave these notebooks to his mother as calligraphic boy and they were lazy by her for recording circlet schooldays and their holidays fatigued together, as well as vex events over this period, State of affairs Library of New South Princedom MLMSS 7956

• Family and personal photographs collected by P.L.

  Travers, motto. 1891–1980, 1 portfolio (51 sooty and white, sepia, col. photographs, 2 photograph albums, 1 helping hand coloured lithograph, 17 coloured transparencies) various sizes, State Library method New South Wales PX*D 334

External links