P. L. TRAVERS
G'day folks,
Today I introduce someone I'd never heard of, yet she was born in Australia. Pamela Lyndon Travers, OBE was an Australian-born British
novelist, actress, and journalist who emigrated to England and lived
most of her adult life there.
Mysterious
and prickly, author P.L. Travers created the beloved governess Mary Poppins,
further popularized by the Disney film and stage musical of the same name.
“Perhaps we are born knowing the tales
of our grandmothers and all their ancestral kin continually run in our blood
repeating them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first bear them is
not of surprise but of recognition.”
—P.L. Travers
P.L.
Travers was born on August 9, 1899, in Queensland, Australia. Her rich fantasy
life propelled her to write stories and poems at an early age, and after a
brief stint in the theater, she moved to London, England, to pursue a literary
life, hobnobbing with Irish poets such as William Butler Yeats. The Mary
Poppins tales sprang from Travers entertaining young visitors, combined with a
love of mythology. The Disney film Mary Poppins made the notoriously
private and prickly Travers immensely wealthy, but also unhappy. She died in
London on April 23, 1996.
P.L.
Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff on August 9, 1899, in Maryborough,
Queensland, Australia. Her mother, Margaret Agnes Morehead, was the sister of
the Premier of Queensland. Her father, Travers Goff, was an unsuccessful bank
manager and heavy drinker who died when she was 7.
Called
Lyndon as a child, Travers moved with her mother and sisters to New South Wales
after her father's death, where they were supported by a great aunt (the
inspiration for her book Aunt Sass). She lived there for 10 years,
although boarded at Sydney's Normanhurst Girls School during World War I.
Travers
had a rich fantasy life and loved fairy tales and animals, often calling
herself a hen. Her precocious reading led her to undertake The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, and her writing talents emerged during her
teens, when she began publishing poems in Australian periodicals.
Adopting
the stage name Pamela (popular at the time) Lyndon Travers, she gained a modest
reputation as a dancer and Shakespearean actress. Her wealthy relatives,
however, did not approve; feeling that Australians lacked humor and lyricism,
she left for London, England, to seek the literary life.
Life as a Writer
Having
begun her journalism career in Australia, Travers was able to parlay her voyage
into travel stories for homeland papers. Once in England, she began publishing
articles in various papers, including poems that she had submitted to The Irish
Statesman. Its editor, George William Russell, pseudonymously known as AE,
became a lifelong supporter of Travers.
Travers
had a love of Irish mythology, perhaps stemming from her father's stories when
she was a child, so the friendship had a special significance. Through Russell,
she also became friends with poet William Butler
Yeats, and further explored her mythological interests
studying with mystic G.I. Gurdjieff.
Travers's
first published book, Moscow Excursion (1934), utilized her
travel-writing experience, but the book that would make her famous
followed close on its heel. Recovering from a lung ailment in the country, she
regaled two visiting children with tales of a magical nanny, complete with a
parrot-head umbrella as a form of transportation and the ability to have tea
parties on the ceiling.
She
published the story, Mary Poppins, that same year (1934), and it
was an instant success. Five more books in the series followed over the ensuing
years, the last being Mary Poppins and the House Next Door in 1988, all
with illustrations by Mary Shepard (daughter of the original illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh),
despite their difficult relationship.
During
World War II, Travers worked for the UK's Ministry of Information, and near the
end of the war lived on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, acquiring an Indian
name that she always kept secret.
Despite
the success of the Poppins books, Travers continued to write other
material—young adult novels, a play, essays and lectures on mythology and
symbols—partly because she feared not being taken seriously as a writer. She
also served as writer-in-residence at colleges such as Radcliffe and Smith,
though she was not popular. The 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins, starring
Julie Andrews and
Dick Van Dyke,
made Travers immensely wealthy, though she reportedly wept at the
premiere. A 2013 film, Saving Mr. Banks, starring Tom Hanks
as Walt Disney
and Emma Thompson
as Travers, tells the behind-the-scenes story of book to film.
Personal Life
Notoriously
private and prickly, Travers never married, but she had a longtime roommate,
Madge Burnand, who many speculated was a romantic partner. In 1939, Travers
adopted a son, Camillus, one of twin Irish boys. (He later ran into his twin in
a pub—a shock, as he knew nothing of his real background.)
In 1999
author Valerie Lawson released a biography on Travers entitled Mary Poppins,
She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers, which excavated the details of her
very private life.
In 1977
Travers was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. She lived to
age 96, dying in London from the effects of an epileptic seizure, on April 23,
1996.
She had
planned to write Goodbye, Mary Poppins, to terminate the beloved
governess, but instead heeded the outcry from both children and publishers. A
musical Mary Poppins closer to Travers's original version of the character
debuted on the London stage in 2004. And
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," born from the Disney film,
through a song written by the Sherman Brothers (sung by Julie Andrews and Dick
Van Dyke), forever lives in the English language.
Clancy's comment: Wow, a very good innings, eh?
I'm ...
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