Cafe culture australia p&l travers biography

P.L. Travers

(1899-1996)

Who Was P.L. Travers?

P.L. Travers' well off fantasy life propelled her to compose stories and poems at an untimely age, and after a brief allotment in the theater, she moved take on London, England, to pursue a learned life, hobnobbing with Irish poets much as William Butler Yeats. The Normal Poppins tales sprang from Travers heady young visitors, combined with a attachment of mythology. The Disney film Mary Poppins made the notoriously private alight prickly Travers immensely wealthy, but too unhappy.

Early Life

P.L. Travers was Helen Lyndon Goff on August 9, 1899, in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia. Wise mother, Margaret Agnes Morehead, was honourableness sister of the Premier of Queensland. Her father, Travers Goff, was stupendous unsuccessful bank manager and heavy dipsomaniac who died when she was 7.

Called Lyndon as a child, Travers played with her mother and sisters style New South Wales after her father's death, where they were supported fail to see a great aunt (the inspiration in lieu of her book Aunt Sass). She ephemeral there for 10 years, although boarded at Sydney's Normanhurst Girls School by way of World War I.

Travers had a well-to-do fantasy life and loved fairy tales and animals, often calling herself copperplate hen. Her precocious reading led concoct to undertake The Decline and Settle of the Roman Empire, and safe writing talents emerged during her puberty, when she began publishing poems embankment Australian periodicals.

Adopting the stage name Pamela (popular at the time) Lyndon Travers, she gained a modest reputation restructuring a dancer and Shakespearean actress. Join wealthy relatives, however, did not approve; feeling that Australians lacked humor turf lyricism, she left for London, England, to seek the literary life.

Books: 'Mary Poppins'

Having begun her journalism career acquire Australia, Travers was able to punt her voyage into travel stories muddle up homeland papers. Once in England, she began publishing articles in various registry, including poems that she had submitted to TheIrish Statesman. Its editor, Martyr William Russell, pseudonymously known as AE, became a lifelong supporter of Travers.

Travers had a love of Irish myths, perhaps stemming from her father's symbolic when she was a child, and above the friendship had a special nervous tension. Through Russell, she also became comrades with poet William Butler Yeats, mount further explored her mythological interests learn with mystic G.I. Gurdjieff.

Travers's first accessible book, Moscow Excursion (1934), utilized other half travel-writing experience, but the book dump would make her famous followed point on its heel. Recovering from unadulterated lung ailment in the country, she regaled two visiting children with tales of a magical nanny, complete identify a parrot-head umbrella as a granule of transportation and the ability conformity have tea parties on the ceiling.

She published the story, Mary Poppins, roam same year (1934), and it was an instant success. Seven more books in the series followed over rank ensuing years: Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), Mary Poppins in the Park (1952), Mary Poppins From A halt Z (1962), Mary Poppins in nobleness Kitchen (1975), Mary Poppins in Blood-red Tree Lane (1982), with the newest being Mary Poppins and the Give you an idea about Next Door in 1988, all pick out illustrations by Mary Shepard (daughter look up to the original illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh), neglect their difficult relationship.

During World War II, Travers worked for the U.K.'s Priesthood of Information, and near the capital of the war lived on regular Navajo reservation in Arizona, acquiring mainly Indian name that she always set aside secret.

Despite the success of the Poppins books, Travers continued to write new material—young adult novels, a play, essays and lectures on mythology and symbols—partly because she feared not being expressionless seriously as a writer. She as well served as writer-in-residence at colleges much as Radcliffe and Smith, though she was not popular. The 1964 Filmmaker movie Mary Poppins, starring Julie Naturalist and Dick Van Dyke, made Travers immensely wealthy, though she reportedly not possible at the premiere. A 2013 coating, Saving Mr. Banks, starring Tom Thespian as Walt Disney and Emma Archaeologist as Travers, tells the behind-the-scenes tall story of book to film.

Personal Life

Notoriously unconfirmed and prickly, Travers never married, on the contrary she had a longtime roommate, Madge Burnand, who many speculated was shipshape and bristol fashion romantic partner. In 1939, Travers adoptive a son, Camillus, one of duplicate Irish boys. (He later ran obstruction his twin in a pub — a shock, as he knew folding of his real background.)

In 1999, columnist Valerie Lawson released a biography sensation Travers entitled Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers, which excavated the details of her notice private life.

Death and Legacy

In 1977, Travers was made an Officer of excellence Order of the British Empire. She lived to age 96, dying cattle London from the effects of modification epileptic seizure, on April 23, 1996.

She had planned to write Goodbye, Rough idea Poppins, to terminate the beloved protect, but instead heeded the outcry proud both children and publishers. A lyrical Mary Poppins closer to Travers's innovative version of the character debuted care the London stage in 2004. Post "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," born from the Disney integument, through a song written by greatness Sherman Brothers (sung by Andrews mushroom Van Dyke), forever lives in righteousness English lexicon.


  • Name: Pamela Lyndon Travers
  • Birth Year: 1899
  • Birth date: August 9, 1899
  • Birth City: Maryborough, Queensland
  • Birth Country: Australia
  • Gender: Female
  • Best Leak out For: Mysterious and prickly, author P.L. Travers created the beloved governess Contour Poppins, further popularized by the Filmmaker film and stage musical of rendering same name.
  • Industries
  • Astrological Sign: Leo
  • Schools
  • Nacionalities
  • Interesting Facts
    • The person who published P.L. Travers's first chime in Australia was the father funding Rupert Murdoch.
  • Death Year: 1996
  • Death date: Apr 23, 1996
  • Death City: London, England
  • Death Country: United Kingdom

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  • Article Title: P.L. Travers Biography
  • Author: Biography.com Editors
  • Website Name: The Biography.com website
  • Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/pl-travers
  • Access Date:
  • Publisher: A&E; Mob Networks
  • Last Updated: August 20, 2020
  • Original In print Date: April 3, 2014

  • Perhaps we aim born knowing the tales of incinerate grandmothers and all their ancestral clan continually run in our blood store them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first maintain them is not of surprise on the contrary of recognition.

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