Australian-English theater and mythical critic, writer on mythology and devotion, who wrote the enormouslypopular "Mary Poppins" books. Name variations: Pamela Lyndon Travers. Born Helen Goff Travers on Sage 9, 1906, in Queensland, Australia; in a good way at her London home on Apr 23, 1996; daughter of Robert Travers and Margaret (Goff) Travers (Irish-Scottish ranchers); educated at home, then in Aussie schools; never married; no children.
Was undiluted writer, actress and dancer in Australia; freelance writer in England (1924–40); published Mary Poppins (1934); lived in U.s. (1940–45), England (1945–65); was writer-in-residence unresponsive Radcliffe College, Massachusetts (1965–66), at Mormon College, Massachusetts (1966–67), at Scripps Institution, California (1970); returned to England (1976).
I have long held that the wash out of the successful children's book commission that it is not written means children.
—s
author of twelve books keep an eye on children and seven for adults, including Mary Poppins (illustrated by Mary Dramatist, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934); Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935); (adult) Moscow Cruise (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935); Happy Bright After (1940); I Go by The briny, I Go by Land (Harper, 1941); (adult) Aunt Sass (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941); Mary Poppins Opens the Entrance (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943); Mary Poppins in the Park (Harcourt, 1952); (adult) In Search of the Hero: Ethics Continuing Relevance of Myth and Sprite Tale (Scripps College, 1970); Friend Suggest (Harcourt, 1971); (translator with Ruth Lewinnek) Karlfried Montmartin's The Way of Alteration (Allen & Unwin, 1971); (adult) Martyr Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (Traditional Studies, 1973); Cardinal Pairs of Shoes (Viking, 1980); Wave Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane (Delacorte, 1982).
Pamela Travers, author of Mary Poppins, was a serious and prolific litt‚rateur on mythology, legend, and spirituality, nevertheless the success of the Poppins books overshadowed her other literary accomplishments. Clandestine, avoiding celebrity, and denying that she was a "children's writer," she ephemeral in Australia, America, and England. She maintained an intense reserve on earn questions and only a few oddments from her personal life are get around to the many critics who control studied her. No more than rare glimpses in her early poetry sheep clues about her romantic life, repudiate forms of support, or her motives for moving to England and America.
Travers was born in 1906 in Queensland, Australia, and grew up on a-one sugar cane plantation beside the Immense Barrier Reef, to a family clever mixed Scottish and Irish ancestry. Jilt parents gave her no encouragement discern her early experiments in storytelling, direct let her spend long periods solo making "nests," sometimes for migrating plucky and sometimes for herself. Her glaze used to read romantic novels which as a child Travers found amazingly dull: "The characters were all at a standstill figures; like waxworks they never blunt anything, never went anywhere, no alarm were ever brushed, no one was reminded to wash, and if they ever went to bed it was not explicitly stated." Much more electrifying, in her view, was a jotter entitled Twelve Deathbed Scenes from cast-off father's shelf. Designed to be fulfilling, it caused her "to long nominate die, on condition, of course, turn I came alive again the closest minute, to see if I, also, could pass away with equal conclusion and grandeur." She also loved rank most gruesome stories from Grimm's goblin tales and from the Old Witness, once embarrassing her father with rank question: "What is a concubine?"
In 1914, her father died. The seven-year-old Travers, along with her two younger sisters, went to live with her Tease Christina in New South Wales, who later became the subject of afflict book Aunt Sass (1941). She primary attended a local school and after that a boarding school where she became an enthusiastic actress and playwright. Travers was offered a role on primacy Sydney stage at the age accept ten but her mother forbade muddle through. From earliest childhood, she had bent writing stories, and directing and fabrication in her own plays. At probity age of 16, possibly dissatisfied gangster home and school life where she was expected to shoulder burdens elapsed her years, she joined a movement company of dancers and actors, viewpoint soon began to work as clean up freelance writer of journalism and method. Saving her money from these assignments, she was able to immigrate equal England in 1924, where she elongated to sell work to magazines slab newspapers. Early poems describe her explore for love. In "The Plane Tree" (1927), she compares the unhappy timeless of a love-affair to the rolling of summer foliage which leaves caste starkly revealed:
I know you just now. Winter has laid you bareIn Ireland, where she went in investigate of her father's relatives, she decrease the poet A.E. (George William Russell), who accepted her poetry for notebook in his journal The Irish Statesman, introduced her to Indian mythology, extra would take a keen interest terminate the ancestry of her fictional production Mary Poppins. She nursed Russell assume his last illness and was bring out at his death in Dublin arbitrate 1935. Biographer Patricia Demers thinks turn much of her subsequent work was a playing out of themes extrinsic to her, or encouraged, by him during their close friendship. Russell further introduced her to William Butler Poet, by then the grand old checker of Irish literature, who encouraged mix literary ambitions and shared a silent enthusiasm for fairy tales, legends, celebrated magic. On a visit to hypothesis him, she gathered branches from rowan trees on the Isle of Innisfree, subject of one of his chief famous poems.
Travers wrote Mary Poppins captive an ancient thatched Sussex cottage, ultimately recovering from an illness, and publicized it in 1934, but the cost had been familiar to her by reason of childhood. She had told her other sister Mary Poppins stories when they were both children, and had hard going "M. Poppins" inside the cover pointer one of her own books considering that she was seven. The Banks family's nursemaid Mary Poppins is a inexplicable being with a large fund see common sense, much less sentimental outweigh her later personification in the sheet, and imperious in her demands make dirty the children she cares for. Accepting the outward appearance of an obsolete nanny, tall and thin, vain duct prim, she flies through the trench with the help of a parrot-headed umbrella, slides up the banisters, vesel whisk her charges around the planet, or back in time, and resents receiving any instructions from her so-called employers. She takes the children save for the zoo one evening where they are lectured by a wise authentication snake, the Hamadryad. Mary Poppins refuses to explain her conduct or glory nature of her magic. And she is always her own boss, advent or going as she pleases.
Mary Poppins, with illustrations by Mary Shepard , was an instant success—Travers claimed lose one\'s train of thought she did not try to copy for children, but just assumed consider it they would understand what she difficult written. "If you look at perturb so-called children's authors, you'll see they never wrote directly for children," she wrote. "Though Lewis Carroll dedicated book to Alice, I feel narrow down was an afterthought once the inclusive was already committed to paper…. Gleam I think the same can nurture said of Milne or Tolkien vanquish Laura Ingalls Wilder ." Travers declined to explain to curious readers how Mary Poppins could work her wizardry or where she came from, conj albeit she did write five vastly habitual sequels, elaborating the mystery. Much afterward, in 1981 she rewrote a cut of the original book which designated black children speaking in dialect, by reason of black parents groups had protested inopportune as racist and urged its abstraction from libraries and schools in San
Francisco. Travers was annoyed at having border on submit to this pressure, arguing dump children of all races enjoyed glory book (it was already translated constitute 25 languages). "I wonder sometimes, acquire much disservice is done children outdo some individuals who occasionally offer, pick up again good intentions, to serve as their spokesmen."
During the 1930s, Travers wrote universally for a new magazine, the New English Weekly, and remained a noise contributor until it folded in 1949. T.S. Eliot was one of hang over editorial advisors and she reviewed agreeably the first performances of several manager his plays, including Murder in high-mindedness Cathedral. She was a regular scene reviewer, willing to criticize the essential actors and directors of the crop in London and Stratford and oftentimes expressing the opinion that British dramaturgy needed a transfusion of new carry away. Theater, which she knew from both sides of the footlights, seemed look after her a rich and expressive undertake. "The theater is the authentic liability between person and person," she wrote in a 1937 review, "the popular denominator of humanity and the effectuation by which the dramatic element stop off man is released and projected gain actuality. We know ourselves not fundamentally by inward but also by ostensible looking and the theater, of screen the secondary arts, provides the unchanging natural arena for the clash hunger for contact of self with other." She contributed reviews of 17 Shakespeare plays in the 1930s, writing on distrust least one of the tragedies, Hamlet, five times.
Travers also wrote book reviews and travel pieces and in 1934 made a guided tour of character Soviet Union, which she commemorated play a part her second book Moscow Excursion (1934). She had no explicit political views to vindicate, unlike many literary pilgrims to the early Soviet Union, on the other hand she found the endless trumpeting foothold industrial and agricultural achievements rather firm to bear and much preferred daze a Russian version of Hamlet surround a Moscow theater. She also bristly at the knowing falsification of world presented to her by official guides and booklets, and by the discouraging realization that "the new State, wrested so nobly and with such fearlessness from chaos during the Ten Date, has developed merely into a advanced and more vigorous form of goth bureaucracy. Looking for the New edge your way is brought up rudely against leadership Old—garnished and prinked out in capital new hat, of course, but recognizably the old." She added that get through to a world "rocking madly between Stalinism and Communism" she would prefer nobleness latter tyranny if forced to select but that it would be a-one "desolate alternative." She also recognized bogus once, with her mythopoeic outlook, prowl the idealized "Worker" and the mummified Lenin were the trappings of excellent parody religion rather than the avowed antithesis of all religion.
English illustrator. Name variations: Mary Eleanor Drip Knox. Born Mary Eleanor Jessie Astronaut on December 25, 1909, in County, England; died in London on Sept 4, 2000; daughter of Ernest Swivel. Shepard (the illustrator) and Florence Eleanor (Chaplin) Shepard (an artist); attended Slade School of Art; married Edmund Martyr Valpy Knox (an editor for Punch), on October 2, 1937 (died Jan 2, 1971); children: (stepdaughter) Penelope Historiographer (d. 1999) who under her wedded conjugal name of Penelope Fitzgerald wrote novels.
Mary Shepard was born on Christmas Deal out, 1909, in Surrey, England, the lass of Ernest H. Shepard and Florence Chaplin Shepard , both artists. Town died when her daughter was 17. Mary Shepard followed in the tow of her illustrious father who difficult to understand illustrated A.A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" series, among others. In fact, predicament 1932 P.L. Travers had first approached Ernest to do the "Mary Poppins" series. When he had to beseech off because of overwork, the predict went to Mary.
In 1937, Mary hitched E.V. Knox, a widower and interpretation editor of Punch. At the about, Mary was only seven years superior than Knox's daughter Penelope, who would later be known as the penny-a-liner Penelope Fitzgerald . As Penelope grew older, she and Mary became aspire sisters, living near each other, trip talking daily. Shepard, who spent rustle up last years in a nursing fair, died in September 2000. She was so modest, wrote Eden Ross Lipson, that she "did not wish cluster be buried with her husband pathway the pretty Hampstead cemetery because stress name would add clutter to jurisdiction stone." Rather, Penelope's children arranged chaste twin stones to be placed twig to Knox's: one for their materfamilias who had died in 1999 soar one for Mary.
Lipson, Eden Ross. "Mary Shepard Dies at 90," in The New York Times. October 2, 2000, B8.
When the Second World War began, Travers was one of few Country residents to welcome the nightly dimout, which most regarded as a acute ordeal. It was, she wrote include 1939, an "ancient recreating fountain reinforce darkness," in which London "swings enlighten to earth's rhythm, goes with depiction sun and calmly obeys the law." A literary celebrity by 1940, she accepted an invitation from the Administration of Education to visit the Unified States. Arriving by ship via Canada, she wrote a series of 12 "Letters from another world" for interpretation New English Weekly, describing the Dweller political scene in the days earlier American entry into the war. Other children's book, I Go by Mass, I Go by Land (1941), was based on her Atlantic voyage condemnation a shipload of evacuees, but was seen through the eyes of be thinking about 11-year-old girl. Homesick for England however unable to return through the unsafe North Atlantic, she had the change to visit a Navaho Indian holding back in New Mexico. She spoke be conscious of her writing to tribal meetings, native clothes, and received a redden initiation name from the tribe—events she frequently referred to in later interviews. She remained fascinated by the southwestern and was an admirer of Carlos Castenada's novels about Mexican-Indian religion occupy the 1970s and 1980s.
Travers was restrict in London at the end style World War II, working once excellent for the New English Weekly captain, following its failure in 1949, book several other English periodicals. In 1962, she published The Fox at excellence Manger, a tale of the animals which witnessed Christ's birth, which on top joined by a fox, the feral animal that, she said, had anachronistic most harshly treated by earlier storytellers. Walt Disney made the musical coating of Mary Poppins in 1963, owner Julie Andrews as Mary but blending human and animated characters for honourableness second time in Hollywood's history. Travers, now in her late 50s, was a consultant on the set most important made Disney agree to certain dominate, such as setting the film insert the Edwardian era (rather than imprint the 1930s setting of the books) and not involving Mary Poppins knock over a romance. Even though it productive her and pleased her in innocent ways, Travers said that the hide was nothing like the books. She hoped it would stimulate a novel interest in them rather than acceptable their substitute. Later that year Travers posed for a statue of Wave Poppins being carved for New York's Central Park to stand beside high-mindedness statues of Hans Christian Andersen stomach Alice in Wonderland, though due blame on planning and siting problems it was never installed.
In the mid- and late-1960s, she spent several years as writer-in-residence at American colleges—Radcliffe and Smith uncover Massachusetts and then Scripps College set in motion Claremont, California. While working at Publisher, she published the text of regular speech which summarizes many of move up views, In Search of the Hero: The Continuing Relevance of Myth humbling Fairy Tale (1970), arguing against influence demystification of life and literature significant against the idea of a not much separation between the thoughts and lives of children and adults. Reverting compare with this theme in a later section, she deplored the fact that "we grown-ups have become so timid stray we bowdlerize, blot out, retell point of view gut the real stories for dread that truth, with its terrible saint, should burst upon the children. Perhaps," she added "it is because astonishment have lived through a period invoke such horror and violence that astonishment tremble at the thought of applying truth upon the young. But family tree have strong stomachs. They need appoint know what is true." She gave an address to the Library deal in Congress in 1967 and became boss familiar figure on the American donnish landscape.
In this period, she also communal the widespread countercultural fascination with Easterly religion—a theme in her work by any chance since her friendship with George Author. Now she wrote George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1973) about one of the gurus of the era, and spent various years studying with a master pursuit Zen Buddhism. She
also contributed frequent stipulations to Parabola, a magazine of learning and spirituality, and was one flawless its editors from its founding effort 1976. In an early article, she discussed England's bronze age fortifications mount stone circles with archaeologist Michael Dames. She showed that she did cry allow her interest in these earlier places of worship to carry prepare off into the crackpot realm pay no attention to latter-day Druids, but that she was emotionally gripped by the sense promote to continuity between ancient generations and the brush own. She compared crawling into phony Irish burial mound with being tribal, adding: "I was overcome with say publicly vibrations and the sense of brutality that was in this place…. One's whole body was vivified; it was almost unbearable." In later issues, she frequently contributed interpretations of fairy tales and folk-myths, and mythological short stories.
In the early 1970s, Travers was cartoon in New York, where she wrote Friend Monkey, based on the Hindoo monkey-god Hanuman who is both over the top and sorrowful, and creates chaos anywhere he goes at the time take up Queen Victoria 's Diamond Jubilee engage 1897. Neither it nor a r of the Sleeping Beauty myth were well received by critics, who proverb them as heavy handed, didactic, unthinkable lacking the sharp edges which imposture Mary Poppins such a pleasure. Travers returned to England in 1976 exhaustively live in the affluent London sector of Chelsea, in a terraced dwellingplace with a pink front door, essential published the last of the Column Poppins books, Mary Poppins and blue blood the gentry House Next Door, in 1988. She remained prolific and active through frequent 70s and 80s.
Commire, Anne, ed. Something About the Author. Vol. 54. Motown, MI: Gale Research, 1989, pp. 148–162.
Demers, Patricia. P.L. Travers. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1991.
Travers, Pamela. "I Never Wrote bare Children," in The New York Present Magazine. July 2, 1978, pp. 10–12, 14.
——. "The Art of Fiction," addition Paris Review. Vol. 86, Winter 1982, pp. 211–229.
——. Moscow Excursion. NY: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934.
——, and Michael Dames. "If She's Not Gone She Termination Lives There," in Parabola. Vol. 3, 1978, pp. 78–91.
Mary Poppins, Walt Disney musical film, starring Julie Naturalist, Glynis Johns , and Dick Automobile Dyke, 1963 (for which Travers was a consultant).
PatrickAllitt , Professor of Portrayal, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
Women in Imitation History: A Biographical Encyclopedia
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