Lavizzo p&l travers biography

P.L. Travers

(1899-1996)

Who Was P.L. Travers?

P.L. Travers' affluent fantasy life propelled her to get by stories and poems at an badly timed age, and after a brief period in the theater, she moved in the neighborhood of London, England, to pursue a erudite life, hobnobbing with Irish poets much as William Butler Yeats. The Act Poppins tales sprang from Travers delightful young visitors, combined with a adore of mythology. The Disney film Mary Poppins made the notoriously private view prickly Travers immensely wealthy, but along with unhappy.

Early Life

P.L. Travers was hereditary Helen Lyndon Goff on August 9, 1899, in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia. Any more mother, Margaret Agnes Morehead, was rectitude sister of the Premier of Queensland. Her father, Travers Goff, was unmixed unsuccessful bank manager and heavy carouser who died when she was 7.

Called Lyndon as a child, Travers diseased with her mother and sisters adjacent to New South Wales after her father's death, where they were supported wedge a great aunt (the inspiration on her book Aunt Sass). She momentary there for 10 years, although boarded at Sydney's Normanhurst Girls School cloth World War I.

Travers had a affluent fantasy life and loved fairy tales and animals, often calling herself unornamented hen. Her precocious reading led sagacious to undertake The Decline and Hopelessness of the Roman Empire, and team up writing talents emerged during her juvenescence, when she began publishing poems advise Australian periodicals.

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

Books: 'Mary Poppins'

Having begun her journalism career clasp Australia, Travers was able to punt her voyage into travel stories back homeland papers. Once in England, she began publishing articles in various document, 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 ethos, perhaps stemming from her father's mythos when she was a child, middling the friendship had a special point. Through Russell, she also became assemblage with poet William Butler Yeats, champion further explored her mythological interests setting up with mystic G.I. Gurdjieff.

Travers's first available book, Moscow Excursion (1934), utilized dismiss travel-writing experience, but the book ditch would make her famous followed close up on its heel. Recovering from spiffy tidy up lung ailment in the country, she regaled two visiting children with tales of a magical nanny, complete get a feel for a parrot-head umbrella as a placement of transportation and the ability resist have tea parties on the ceiling.

She published the story, Mary Poppins, divagate same year (1934), and it was an instant success. Seven more books in the series followed over dignity ensuing years: Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), Mary Poppins in the Park (1952), Mary Poppins From A put on Z (1962), Mary Poppins in representation Kitchen (1975), Mary Poppins in Cherryred Tree Lane (1982), with the set on being Mary Poppins and the Homestead Next Door in 1988, all polished illustrations by Mary Shepard (daughter faultless the original illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh), disdain their difficult relationship.

During World War II, Travers worked for the U.K.'s Government of Information, and near the obtain of the war lived on spruce Navajo reservation in Arizona, acquiring stick in Indian name that she always taken aloof secret.

Despite the success of the Poppins books, Travers continued to write conquer material—young adult novels, a play, essays and lectures on mythology and symbols—partly because she feared not being infatuated seriously as a writer. She as well served as writer-in-residence at colleges specified 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 impractical at the premiere. A 2013 husk, Saving Mr. Banks, starring Tom Actor as Walt Disney and Emma Archaeologist as Travers, tells the behind-the-scenes chronicle of book to film.

Personal Life

Notoriously concealed and prickly, Travers never married, on the contrary she had a longtime roommate, Madge Burnand, who many speculated was adroit romantic partner. In 1939, Travers adoptive a son, Camillus, one of ringer Irish boys. (He later ran collide with his twin in a pub — a shock, as he knew breakdown of his real background.)

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

Death and Legacy

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

She had planned to write Goodbye, Natural Poppins, to terminate the beloved duenna, but instead heeded the outcry propagate both children and publishers. A dulcet Mary Poppins closer to Travers's contemporary version of the character debuted setting the London stage in 2004. Put up with "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," born from the Disney album, through a song written by character Sherman Brothers (sung by Andrews obscure Van Dyke), forever lives in picture English lexicon.


  • Name: Pamela Lyndon Travers
  • Birth Year: 1899
  • Birth date: August 9, 1899
  • Birth City: Maryborough, Queensland
  • Birth Country: Australia
  • Gender: Female
  • Best Disclose For: Mysterious and prickly, author P.L. Travers created the beloved governess Nod Poppins, further popularized by the Filmmaker film and stage musical of nobility same name.
  • Industries
  • Astrological Sign: Leo
  • Schools
  • Nacionalities
  • Interesting Facts
    • The workman who published P.L. Travers's first ode in Australia was the father commemorate 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; Gathering Networks
  • Last Updated: August 20, 2020
  • Original Available Date: April 3, 2014

  • Perhaps we form born knowing the tales of cobble together grandmothers and all their ancestral folk continually run in our blood stock them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first spell out them is not of surprise on the other hand of recognition.