How Mary Poppins' creator P L Travers wrecked the lives of two innocent boys | Daily Mail Online Next How the sexual adventuress who created Mary Poppins wrecked the lives of two innocent boys: Exploits of P L Travers that you won't see in new film Saving Mr Banks Pamela L Travers took in only one of the two twin brothers she said she'd adopt in 1940 Camillus Hone whisked off by her to privileged life; while Anthony was left with neglectful relatives London-born actor Lawrence Campbell was ‘the first in a long chain of men who would, in [Travers'] words, pass her from one to the other’ Who Was P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins Author? | History Kitchen | PBS Food Tori Avey | December 16, 2013 On her website ToriAvey.com , Tori Avey explores the story behind the food – why we eat what we eat, how the recipes of different cultures have evolved, and how yesterday’s recipes can inspire us in the kitchen today. Learn more about Tori and The History Kitchen . Many unsavory claims have been made about Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers.

It is said that she was not fond of children. She supposedly despised cookies and California. She loathed the Disney film adaptation of her beloved Mary Poppins so much that her will forbade the possibility of a sequel ever being made. There are several tales like these, yet it seems impossible that someone so persnickety could be capable of writing such a magical children’s book series. Granted, the character of Mary Poppins in the novels is quite different than the nanny depicted by Julie Andrews. Even so, children have been enchanted with Travers’ writing for decades. Just who was P.L. Travers, and was she really as cantankerous as we’ve been led to believe? A beautiful young P.L. Travers as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream c. 1920, photographer unknown. Source: Wikimedia Commons Born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia in 1899, P.L. Travers led a life cloaked in mystery. Even after her death in 1996, the details of her past were unclear. An obituary in the Guardian stated that she was the granddaughter of the premier of Queensland; another in the New York Times described her as the daughter of a sugar planter.

While neither of these details are exactly true, we can hardly blame the writers for poor fact checking. Travers had a tendency to bend her life story and make it more attractive, a trait she likely inherited from her father, Travers Robert Goff. He also liked to reinvent his life story; not even his wife was privy to the truth about his past. Goff was a heavy drinker. He spent many evenings spinning stories of a fairytale-like childhood spent in Ireland, though he was actually born in England. Lyndon, as P.L.’s family called her, would spend her life chasing her father’s fantasies. Eventually his myths melded with her own version of the truth to create a personal history that was part reality, part fiction. In her early twenties Lyndon pursued an acting career, changing her name to Pamela and adopting her father’s first name as her last—Pamela Lyndon Travers. It sounded more romantic, more melodic. She later moved to London as a journalist, adopting the pen name P.L. Travers. Further veils were cast, blurring the truth of her history as Pamela invented a new life that seemed much more exciting.

Pamela’s father Travers Robert Goff was a bank manager that had been demoted to bank clerk, though if you asked Pamela she would likely tell you that he oversaw a sugar plantation in Australia while donning a white suit and matching hat. Goff’s true career served as the inspiration for Mr. Banks, the patriarch of the Mary Poppins series. Though her father’s actual position was somewhat unimpressive, Pamela’s mother, Margaret Morehead, came from a wealthy and influential Australian family (she was, in fact, the niece of the Premier of Queensland, so the Guardian wasn’t entirely off base). Pamela’s parents often traveled, leaving her behind with her Aunt Ellie. The loneliness she felt at being apart from her parents fueled her imagination; her stories helped to keep her company. From the age of 4 she liked to imagine herself as a brooding hen, and would often sit with her arms folded tightly around her body. This practice would later translate to her writing process, which she felt required a great deal of “brooding” or pondering. Pamela has often been quoted as saying, in one way or another, that Mary Poppins was family.

This was symbolically true, as she drew quite a bit of inspiration from her own life when writing the books. Several of Mary Poppins’ quotes, such as “anything worth doing is worth doing well,” came directly from Pamela’s mother. The mannerisms and attitude of Mary Poppins drew heavily from Pamela’s Aunt Ellie, who was stern but warm hearted. Bits of Aunt Ellie could also be found in several other Mary Poppins characters, including the Banks’ neighbor Miss Lark and Mr. Banks’ own nanny, Miss Andrew. When Aunt Ellie passed, she left her most prized possessions to her family and friends. The list of items reads like the contents of Mary Poppins’ magical bag, from a candelabra to a traveling clock. There are many misconceptions about P.L. Travers; this was partly her own doing. She chose to rewrite her own history, making it somewhat impossible to know the real Pamela—or Lyndon, as she was called in childhood. When you begin to peel back the many layers of her story, you find a woman with a colorful imagination who was the product of a strange, stern and sometimes lonely upbringing.

No doubt she was frequently a difficult and even unpleasant person, however the broad strokes often used to describe her personality are not completely fair. Did she despise cookies? Perhaps, and yet she included an oatmeal cookie recipe in a cookbook she wrote (more on that below). Was she anti-California? Probably, and yet I can’t help but think her distaste for the state was mostly due to Hollywood-based Walt Disney adapting her beloved books for film. As for disliking children, in 1939 she adopted a baby boy named Camillus (one of twin boys from Ireland) who she raised as her own son. In a 1982 interview with the Paris Review, Travers also expressed gratitude to children for including her books “in their treasure trove.” So she must have liked children a little. At the very least she appreciated them. I recently stumbled upon a short cookbook written by P.L. Travers. Mary Poppins in the Kitchen: A Cookbook with a Story, first published in 1975, takes place over the course of a week. Mary Poppins and the Banks children, along with several characters from the series, take over the kitchen and create dishes beginning with every letter of the alphabet.

“All that is or was or will be happens between A and Z,” says Mary Poppins. “And that includes this cookery book.” A recipe for chocolate Zodiac Cake “decorated with silver stars” stood out above the rest. It produces a simple, thin, nutty cake—a short single layer, with delicate slices just right for serving with tea. I used hazelnuts in the batter, however other nuts can be substituted. The cake was a little on the dry side, so I topped it with a chocolate cream cheese frosting which improved it immensely—and of course, I decorated it with silver stars, just as Mary Poppins would do! You can uncover more fascinating food history on Tori’s website: The History Kitchen . Mary Poppins Zodiac Cake Yield: One 10-11 inch round, single layer cake Research Sources Burness, Edwina, and Jerry Griswold. “P. L. Travers, The Art of Fiction No. 63.” The Paris Review. The Paris Review, 1982. Web. 10 Dec. 2013. Lawson, Valerie. Mary Poppins She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers, Creator of Mary Poppins.

Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2010. Travers, P. L., Maurice Moore-Betty, and Mary Shepard. Mary Poppins in the Kitchen: A Cookery Book with a Story. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Meet the Author Tori Avey is a food writer, recipe developer, and the creator of ToriAvey.com . She explores the story behind the food – why we eat what we eat, how the foods of different cultures have evolved, and how yesterday’s food can inspire us in the kitchen today. Tori’s food writing and photography have appeared on the websites of CNN, Bon Appetit, Zabar’s, Williams-Sonoma, Yahoo Shine, LA Weekly and The Huffington Post. Follow Tori on Facebook: Tori Avey , Twitter: @toriavey , or Google +. More Mary Poppins from PBS 'Mary Poppins, She Wrote' author discusses P.L Travers, 'Saving Mr.

Banks' - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Valerie Lawson talks 'Mary Poppins, She Wrote' and P.L Travers Biography reveals original character's sharp edge December 20, 2013|By Kevin Nance The new Disney movie "Saving Mr. Banks" is partly based on "Mary Poppins, She Wrote" by Valerie Lawson, which is about the life of P.L. Travers, who wrote the book on which the "Mary Poppins" movie is based. (Francois Duhamel ) In the film “Saving Mr. Banks,” the children's author P.L. Travers finds herself in tense negotiations with Walt Disney over the 1964 film version of Travers' classic stories featuring the magical English nanny Mary Poppins. Played in what's rumored to be an Oscar-worthy performance by Emma Thompson, Travers struggles to protect her sharp-edged creation from being softened too much by Disney (Tom Hanks). She fails, ultimately, but along the way, the audience learns how “Mary Poppins” — the book, not the movie — reflects Travers' own troubled history as the daughter of an alcoholic father and a psychologically fragile mother in Australia.

The original source of much of that history is “Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers,” by the Australian journalist Valerie Lawson. Originally published in Australia in 1999, the book later saw print in Great Britain and America as a result of renewed interest in Travers due to the West End and Broadway productions of Cameron Mackintosh's stage musical “Mary Poppins.” Lawson's book is receiving a new wave of attention in paperback form as a result of “Saving Mr. Banks,” in theaters now. Printers Row Journal caught up with Lawson, a former feature writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, for a telephone interview from her home in Sydney. Here's an edited transcript of our chat. Q: Your book was published a number of years ago, but now with the movie coming out, you must be getting a lot of interview requests. A: Yes, any time anything new happens regarding Pamela Travers, there's a lot of interest in the book. When "Mary Poppins, She Wrote" was published for the first time in Australia, it was too early, in a way.

Nobody knew much about Travers, including the fact that she was an Australian, in part because almost nothing had been written about her. She was this mystery woman. But not long after that, Cameron Mackintosh, the English theater producer, created the stage musical, which opened in London in 2004 and later went to Broadway. The book was published then for the first time in Britain and the States, in 2005-06. And now with the film — which is partly based on a documentary based on my book by an Australian filmmaker, Ian Collie, who is also one of the producers of "Saving Mr. Banks" — everyone is now interested again. It's like she never goes away, but at the same time she's never fully revealed. It's lucky for me, the way things have worked out. Q: Have you seen the film? A: Yes, I've seen it twice. Q: What do you think of it? A: It's a really good film. I think Emma Thompson has just nailed it. She's really annoyingly funny and lovable, which was a really hard thing to do.

Travers was a lovable woman in many ways, but as a public figure, no, she was quite sharp, as you can see in the film. Of course she had a lot of life issues that explain, much more than they can do in flashbacks in the film, why she was so prickly. Tom Hanks is good; he makes Disney lovely, although Disney wasn't totally lovely or lovable. Q: I saw Emma Thompson on a talk show recently, and she said Travers wasn't very nice. Do you agree? A: Nice? Well, certainly she wasn't your best friend. She wasn't warm and fuzzy. If you think of a children's writer being like, I don't know, your favorite auntie or something, she was completely unlike that. She was Australian, but she assumed this identity of an upper-middle-class Englishwoman who was demanding, you know, and commanding. She didn't give in to anyone's questions or explain herself.

So when they say in the movie, "We're going to put in this song now," or "Dick Van Dyke will play Bert" — a shocking piece of casting — she's always saying, "Definitely not." She was trying to protect her precious Mary Poppins, who she feared — and she was right — that Disney would make very pretty and sweet. Julie Andrews was not the Mary Poppins she created. Q: Travers had a difficult life, in some ways. A: That's right. She was the daughter of an alcoholic, and later adopted a son who also became an alcoholic. At the time the "Mary Poppins" movie was being made, her son was actually in prison for drunk driving without a license. And she never married, so she had to go through everything alone. She had a lot of reasons to be not very jolly. Q: But she wasn't a monster, either. A: No. Some of the English newspapers, not knowing very much about her, have written that she was a "dragon woman." It's not true. She was a complex woman, and not inclined to be particularly friendly. But of course filmmakers want a lovable character, even though the character may do very unpleasant things.

Look at Tony Soprano. But there wasn't much lovable about Travers, which is what made it so challenging for Emma. Q: Why is it, do you think, that Travers was so protective of the book? The truth behind Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers The truth behind Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers The creator of Mary Poppins was practically imperfect. Tim Barlass More There is a small grey feather amongst a bundle of documents in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The caption alongside reads: ''Feather that fell at my feet from a flying bird in Pitt Street, Sydney - a few days before I sailed for England on Feb 9th 1924.'' These are the words of the little- known P.L. Travers, the Australian creator of the quintessentially English nanny Mary Poppins. Perhaps the feather was inspiration for the song in the movie Feed the Birds. The story of Travers is about to become much more familiar with the release on Thursday of Saving Mr Banks covering the author's early years and the deal with Walt Disney to make the film of her creation.

Related Content Saving Mr Banks: Mary Poppins creator gives 'Uncle Walt' Disney hell Tom Hanks is convincing enough as Disney with squinty eyes and a passable moustache, and Emma Thompson, who some would say is good in everything, is Travers. The movie was clearly dependant on the co-operation of Disney Corp for use of essential footage, so perhaps it isn't surprising that Walt comes across as the hero of the hour. He flies to Britain to save the day and convince Travers to sign the movie contract. Advertisement The 30 boxes of documents at the Mitchell tell a slightly different story, showing the transatlantic agreement was signed without the two parties needing to meet face to face. Also glossed over are details of Travers's rather colourful love life. She had a series of close and, for the times, maybe inappropriate attachments. Among those was a liaison with playwright George William Russell, regarded in the 1920s as an intellectual colossus in Dublin. He was almost 57 when he met a 25-year-old Travers to whom he sent letters with coloured sketches and called ''my angel''. SHARE Link Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. ''Emma Thompson does really well.

It is very hard to do a grumpy woman, a woman who appears to be unpleasant for the sake of it. It was much more complex than that really,'' she says. ''If they had wanted to show the whole of Travers, mentally, physically and the psychological whole they would have included something about her son. She adopted a son and it worked out so badly. ''She even went to an astrologer and asked his opinion [on which child to choose]. For an independent woman - leaving Australia when she was young, alone with virtually no money - she was a strong woman and yet she had this whimsical, peculiar, completely strange side.'' SHARE Photo: NSW State Library Lawson says this strange side would later cause problems for Travers and her adopted son. ''When she was in Hollywood, her son was in prison in England for drunk driving without a licence,'' Lawson says. ''He had been an alcoholic since his late teens, so in adopting this child, who was a twin, and not telling him that he was a twin, or adopted - his twin brother found him in the pub - it put a terrific strain on their relationship.'' After the liaison with Russell, Travers's subsequent love life was disastrous, Lawson says.

''A womaniser, Francis Macnamara and then three women. Madge Burnand, Jessie Orage and an artist called Gertrude Hermes. ''There was a lot of angst, a lot of intimacy. After that she turned her eye to the gurus.'' Lawson says Travers believed there was an arrangement between her and the Disney company for a sequel to Mary Poppins, so she was very cautious and would say, ''Thank you, it was great,'' in correspondence about the film. In a telegram to Walt Disney in the Mitchell collection, she is effusive in her congratulations after the movie's first night. She writes ''… from my point of view keeps contact with the spirit of Mary Poppins … and for your faithfulness my thanks and affection. Pamela Travers.'' However, Lawson says: ''But privately, in private letters more and more as she got older, she really hated it and then 10 years after the movie she disliked it, and 20 years after the movie she hated it and didn't hold back from saying that. ''She didn't like the way it was all smiles and Julie was so sweet and of course Dick Van Dyke was atrocious, every one agrees on that.

She thought all the real magic had been taken out and that it had been Disneyfied.'' One letter from a fan of the original books, writing in 1964 and kept in Travers's collection, agreed. ''I saw Walt Disney's movie Mary Poppins and it saddened me that he made such a hash of it. Walt Disney made her behave in a very undecorous [sic] manner contrary to the ever-perfect, prim and proper Mary Poppins.'' Another fan of the books was Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House, where, ''Caroline is charmed and we know within a few short years John, Jr will be also,'' wrote the First Lady's social secretary to Travers. It's interesting, too, that it seems Travers was keen for Maggie Smith or Vanessa Redgrave to play Mary Poppins in a musical version of the story, to which she retained the rights. The documents contain a letter from Redgrave to Travers dated July 1966, in which the actor says it made her ''very happy'' to be asked to play the role. ''The Mary Poppins books were some of my most favourite when I was a child,'' Redgrave wrote.

She regretted that pressure of work meant she didn't have time to accept the role. One insight into the travails of producing the Mary Poppins blockbuster, to be found among the Mitchell Library documents, is a handwritten letter from Julie Andrews. Despite most people's misgivings, the star writes: ''Dick Van Dyke is great as Bert - and his Cockney is really not too bad. ''He's extremely willing and I like to think he and I look well together on the screen.'' Later, referring to some items that had hit the cutting room floor, she adds: ''Best of all my lullaby is back in! Your letter did the trick I think - though don't say I said so. ''As for me, I hardly know what I'm at! Filming is so different from anything I've ever done. ''Please excuse atrocious scribble - this letter is written in the half dark on the set - and I have to keep popping up to rehearse etc.'' Only through rehearsal could she become, as Mary Poppins would say, ''Practically perfect in every way''. Travers died in London in 1996. Related Content Saving Mr.

Banks Left Out an Awful Lot -- Vulture Print Share Saving Mr. Banks is based on a true story. Well, it's based on a true story the way the movie Mary Poppins is based on the book Mary Poppins — which is to say loosely, and without some of the really unusual and intense juicy parts. The movie tells the story of author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) and her collaboration with Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), et al, on the movie adaptation of her beloved children's book, an adaptation she was loath to agree to in the first place. In Saving Mr. Banks' end credits, we hear some of the actual tape recordings of Travers's contentious writing sessions with Disney and two of his most successful songwriters, Richard and Robert Sherman (played in the movie by Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak). Was she cantankerous? Hard to please? It sure seems like it! But the movie distorts or just plain leaves out some interesting facets of Travers's life — omissions that would have created a deeper, more interesting depiction of Travers and would have made the Disney intellectual-property-gobbling machine a bit less sympathetic. P.L. Travers was a mother.

Banks doesn't acknowledge this at all, but at age 40, Travers adopted a son, Camillus. She did not, however, adopt his twin, and when Camillus was 17, he and his twin bumped into each other at a pub, ripping open Camillus's relationship with his mother (who, until that point, he thought was his biological mother). Banks presents Travers as sort of odd and unloving, and maybe she was. But she did raise a child — a child from whom she was estranged when she finally agreed to Walt Disney's years-long attempt to adapt Mary Poppins. Travers never married, but she did have relationships with male and female partners. In Banks, Travers has a sort of uptight Old Maid thing going on. But in life, she seems to have had some robust romantic relationships.

From a 2005 New Yorker piece : Flirtatious, charming, smart, unmarried, and a welcome addition to the convivial pub scene, she had the bounder’s willingness to press her work on anyone who might help her, and when her submission of poems to the Irish Statesman was met with a promising letter from its editor, the poet George Russell—known as A.E.—she went to Dublin to see him. A.E., a married man of fifty-six, was a reckless encourager of young people. His literary connections extended from the house next door—the Dublin home of Yeats—to New York and the Continent, and he offered them all to Travers. A theosophist, he urged her to take up the study of mysticism, which became a lifelong preoccupation. They began a relationship that was filial, intellectual, and marked by romantic gestures. It lasted until his death, ten years later. Russell also introduced Travers to Madge Burnand , a family friend, and Travers and Burnand moved in together shortly thereafter. (Burnand was one of the first people to read any of the Mary Poppins books.) Yes, P.L.

Travers cried at the movie premiere — but not the way it was portrayed in Banks. The movie is structured to make us root for Walt Disney; after all, we know the story ends with the creation of the family classic Mary Poppins — who could object to that? ( Some of us , it turns out.) In the film, Emma Thompson weeps at the Mary Poppins premiere, overcome with apparent relief and feeling, finally, that she had some kind of closure on the death of her erratic, alcoholic father (who died when she was 7). This is not accurate. This is from Valerie Lawson's exhaustive biography Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers: During the premiere, Pamela cried, to the embarrassment of Disney and his staff. It was such a shock, that name on the screen, Mary Poppins. So sudden. It hardly mattered, then, that her name was in such small type, listed as a "consultant" at first, then in the line "Based on the stories by P. L. Travers." Travers herself described this reaction in a letter to her publisher.

And from The New Yorker: The première was the first Travers had seen of the movie — she did not initially receive an invitation, but had embarrassed a Disney executive into extending one — and it was a shock. Afterward, as Richard Sherman [played by Jason Schwartzman in Banks] recalled, she tracked down Disney at the after-party, which was held in a giant white tent in the parking lot adjoining the Chinese Theatre. "Well," she said loudly. "The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence." Disney looked at her coolly. "Pamela," he replied, "the ship has sailed." Ouch. Also, if Travers ever reached a state of peace regarding her father's death, she didn't mention it in a 1994 interview with the New York Times. "My father died when I was 7," she says. "I was his favorite child, and he was my beloved father. I brought him along with me all through my life. Every elderly man has a bit of my father in him for me." Saving Mr. Banks presents giving up one's artistic integrity as a therapeutic process — isn't it ultimately in P. L.

Travers's best interest to allow her characters to become unrecognizable in the hands of a giant corporation? I mean, sure, it's sort of noble that she wants to retain creative control of her own actual ideas, but weigh that against the catchiness of "Let's Go Fly a Kite." "Kite" wins every time! And that's where the discomfiting feeling of having consumed propaganda comes from. Saving Mr. Banks is produced by Disney, and stars Tom freaking Hanks as Walt himself. Of course Disney — the man and the corporation — will prevail! But it could have been a fairer fight in the movie, and what was presented as a joyless, loveless pedant finally giving herself over to the delight and imagination of the Wonderful World of Disney could just as easily been presented as a creative, passionate person, with dignity and real emotions, getting steamrolled by one of the most powerful companies in the world. Chim-chim-cheroo. Tags: Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers - By Valerie Lawson.

- Books - Review - The New York Times The New York Times Sunday Book Review |The Nanny Diarist Search Continue reading the main story The author P. L. Travers led a fascinating life. She hobnobbed with Yeats, wrote poetry, traveled the world, followed the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and found time along the way to create a beloved fictional character who has been adored by generations of children (and adults). The six Mary Poppins books, published over a 50-year period, brought Travers professional success. But her personal life was often muddled. Born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia in 1899, Travers was the daughter of Travers Goff, a banker, drinker and bamboozler who died when she was 7. (She took his first name as her surname to pursue an acting career, simply inventing the first name Pamela.) Despite her father’s demotion and death, the family remained in relative comfort, thanks to wealthy relatives, who, however, disapproved of Travers’s theatrical ambitions. So she took off for England, where she abandoned the theater for journalism — and the novels that would make her famous.

Valerie Lawson has devoted years of scholarly study to Mary Poppins and her creator, and die-hard Poppins fans will no doubt greet her copiously researched book (the first biography of Travers, published in Australia in 1999) with a great clattering of umbrellas and carpetbags. But “Mary Poppins, She Wrote” is often a slog, and it’s missing the context and emotional insight that might have made it read more like a fully fleshed portrait of a life, rather than an exhaustive account of a career. (Two world wars are glossed over, while a newspaper ad Travers’s mother placed, trying to rent a cottage, is provided in its exact wording.) Lawson, a feature writer for The Sydney Morning Herald, reports where Travers went, whom she met and what she said in letters and essays, but she keeps Travers at arm’s length. Biographers don’t have to love their subjects, but Lawson doesn’t even seem to like hers. According to Lawson, Travers “deeply resented anyone prying into her personal life” — a challenge to potential biographers.

But Lawson also argues that “if Travers had been serious in her wish for privacy, she would have destroyed all her personal letters, all her notes, all the audiotapes made of her lectures, formal and informal, and her collection of photographs. Instead she sold her papers, including private papers, to the Mitchell Library in Sydney.” Travers may have said no, but her paraphernalia said, “Take me, I’m yours.” Photo P. L. Travers and her son, Camillus, in 1947. Credit From “Mary Poppins, She Wrote” Her desire for privacy may have had something to do with her rather murky love life: she harbored long-held crushes on older men and lived for more than a decade with a woman named Madge Burnand, daughter of Sir Francis Burnand, a playwright and the former editor of Punch.

Though Lawson characterizes Travers’s friendship with Madge as “intense,” she also says “there is no evidence that she actually had a lover in the 1920’s, although her relationship with Madge is ambiguous.” “The bare-breasted photo,” she adds, with infuriating hyper-discretion, “is likely to have been shot by Madge, but that is hardly evidence that the two women were sexually intimate.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The sheer eccentricity of Travers’s story does sometimes manage to transcend Lawson’s reportorial fastidiousness. After Madge moved out, Travers, at the age of 39, tried to adopt her teenage maid, arranging to build the girl a bedroom off her study. Despite her arguments that the maid’s parents had enough children — what was one kid, give or take? — the girl and her family balked. Travers then adopted a baby from Ireland, one of a set of twins (she got to choose the child she liked better). This son, named Camillus, grew up believing that “Daddy had had some kind of an accident and died in the tropics.” When he was 17, he happened to run into his twin brother in a pub.

You can imagine the conversation. Continue reading the main story Travers made a fortune when Disney came calling in 1959, and Lawson’s account of her movie dealings are a high point, with the prickly writer fruitlessly attempting to protect her creation from being corrupted by the forces of pop culture. The Mary Poppins imagined by Travers was, of course, a very different woman from the Walt Disney nanny. The Mary of the books, as Lawson reminds us, “was tart and sharp, rude, plain and vain.” In short, she was less like Julie Andrews and more like P. L. Travers. Ever more cantankerous with age, Travers seemed less and less willing to accommodate others. A writer-in-residence appointment at Smith College didn’t go at all well, and some students, Lawson reports, even wore “a popular lapel button, ‘Mary Poppins Is a Junkie.’ ” In the aftermath, Travers worked hard to secure a movie sequel to “Mary Poppins” as well as a musical production, but her deals kept falling through (though a musical version is finally scheduled to open on Broadway next month). By the time she reached her 90’s, her attention was focused on planning her funeral.

And she announced that she didn’t want her death notice to “reveal any personal data.” The west wind finally took her, at 96. After 400 pages of Lawson’s biographical probing, Travers’s life is now public record — but the woman herself is still too much of a mystery. Chelsea Cain is the author of a novel, “Confessions of a Teen Sleuth.” A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 725 of the New York edition with the headline: The Nanny Diarist. Today's Paper | Subscribe 8 Things You Didn't Know About 'Mary Poppins' | The Huffington Post 8 Things You Didn't Know About 'Mary Poppins' 12/26/2013 12:27 pm ET | Updated Feb 25, 2014 180 Valerie Lawson Author P.L. Travers, the Australian author of Mary Poppins, was as mysterious and elusive as her creation -- the nanny who flew into the Banks' family household with her parrot-headed umbrella, a carpetbag and no nonsense method of magically making order out of chaos.

Not long before Travers died, I wrote to ask her if we could meet in London. She replied: "I don't like personal publicity but I'm willing to talk about my work any way you like." We never did have that conversation. By the time I arrived in London, she had died. But luckily, she left many clues, biographical articles, notebooks and letters, and if you look very carefully into the pages of the Mary Poppins books, a picture of Travers' life will emerge. Her story can also be read in the fictional characters of Mary Poppins. The daughter of the Banks household, Jane Banks, is based on Travers' own childhood while Jane's father, Mr. Banks, shares many of the characteristics of Travers' father, a bank manager. The tough love of the Great Aunt Travers' great aunt Ellie, whose real name was Morehead, inspired the character of Mary Poppins.

Ellie, a spinster who lived with her two little dogs in Sydney, was a martinet, carried a carpetbag and when children came to stay, she gave them lessons in etiquette, suffered no nonsense and instructed them to "Spit spot into bed!" Mary Poppins carried a carpetbag just like Aunt Ellie's but the nanny's bag became a magical carry-all that contained an apron, a packet of hairpins, a bottle of scent, a small folding armchair, a packet of throat lozenges, a large bottle of dark red medicine, seven flannel nightgowns, one pair of boots, a set of dominoes, two bathing caps, one postcard album, one folding camp bedstead, blankets and an eiderdown. The peg doll Poppins The original Mary Poppins didn't look at all like the pretty Julie Andrews in the Walt Disney film. The illustrations in the Poppins' books show the nanny with a turned up nose, shiny, painted black hair, small, bright blue eyes, rosy red cheeks and absolutely no curves at all. Her appearance was based on a wooden peg doll that Travers loved as a youth living in Australia.

The illustrator was Mary Shepard, the daughter of Ernest Shepard, illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. Travers took Mary Shepard on walks through Hyde Park in London, pointing out children as suitable models for the Banks children, Jane and Michael. The nanny is stranger than you know. Mary Poppins can speak to more than just the birds. She has conversations with a dog, a snake, sea creatures, the sun and the planets. In one of her adventures, she dances with the planets and is kissed by the sun. In the morning, she has a small burn on her cheek from the sun's kiss. Poppins wasn't just one book but many The first was published in 1934, a decade after Travers moved to England where she spent most of her life. The last, Mary Poppins and the House Next Door, was published in 1988 when Travers was 88. In the 1960s Travers sold the film rights to Walt Disney for £100,000 and was paid 5 per cent of the gross profits of the film that Disney made in 1964. The movie merchandising included Walt Disney's Mary Poppins books.

They out sold the real Poppins books 5:1. Jane Banks and P L Travers not only fed the birds, they became birds In Mary Poppins Comes Back, the second book in the series, Jane Banks refers to herself as a hen who has just laid "seven lovely white eggs and I am sitting with my wings over them brooding. Cluck-cluck!" As a child growing up in Queensland, Australia, Travers told her parents she could not come into the house for dinner as she was busy in the garden laying eggs. As an adult, she collected china hen ornaments. Why are Mary Poppins feet often shown in a turned out ballet position? Travers was a dancer when she was in her teens and although she wasn't trained as a ballet dancer she knew all the positions of the feet and she danced as Titania in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Poppins has flown all over the world Mary Poppins has been translated into 17 languages. In 1968, Travers self published a Latin translation, titled Maria Poppina ab A ad Z. Why is the new movie starring Emma Thompson as Travers and Tom Hanks as Disney called Saving Mr. Banks?

In the Mary Poppins books, Mr. Banks is the patriarch of the family who is so obsessed with his working life that he doesn't have much time for his children. Travers believed that Mary Poppins came to the Banks family to save Mr. Banks from his unfulfilled life and to make him realize that family was his real priority. Travers' father was a bank manager who died when he was in his 40s of alcohol-related diseases. Travers, in turn, wished she could have saved her father from his own demons. Valerie Lawson is the author of Mary Poppins, She Wrote, the Life of P L Travers , published by Simon & Schuster. Close SUBSCRIBE TO & FOLLOW CULTURE SHIFT Every Friday, HuffPost's Culture Shift newsletter helps you figure out which books you should read, art you should check out, movies you should watch and music should listen to. Learn more Newsletter

Question: Who wrote the children’s novel ‘Mary Poppins’?
Answer: P.L. Travers