The Author of Mary Poppins

The Unknown Story of P L Travers

Elisabeth Galvin

• Publisher: White Owl
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781399043199
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

Learn how an elusive writer's spiritual life shaped Mary Poppins, from Australia to Kyoto Zen.

Mary Poppins is a publishing phenomenon of eight books written across 55 years, translated into 20 languages, including Swahili. The 1964 Disney film starring Julie Andrews remains one of the most popular children’s movies of all time. Yet the author did not want it to be known whether she was ‘man, woman or kangaroo’. The elusive PL Travers was, in fact, born in outback Australia in the penultimate year of the 19th century. She became a pioneering journalist in Russia, wrote propaganda for the war effort in New York, lived on a Navajo Indian reservation and was only the second Western woman to study Zen in Kyoto. Deeply spiritual, as one of the inner sanctum of the mystic GI Gurdjieff, she wanted to communicate through Mary Poppins more than carpet bags and parrot umbrellas.

With new source material taken from interviews with PL Travers’ family and friends, this biography shares a new perspective on this extraordinary and complex author.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter One Blown in on the East Wind
• Chapter Two Early Childhood
• Chapter Three Once Upon a Time
• Chapter Four The Real Mary Poppins
• Chapter Five Mother of Mary
• Chapter Six Flying the Nest
• Chapter Seven Love and Life in London
• Chapter Eight The Irish Dream
• Chapter Nine Spiritual Influences
• Chapter Ten Publishing Poppins
• Chapter Eleven A Turned-up Nose
• Chapter Twelve Where Did She Come From?
• Chapter Thirteen Myth and Mary
• Chapter Fourteen Becoming a Mother
• Chapter Fifteen Pamela Across the Pond
• Chapter Sixteen A Native American Adventure
• Chapter Seventeen Home at Last
• Chapter Eighteen Goodly and Badly
• Chapter Nineteen Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
• Chapter Twenty Life is Never the Same Again
• Chapter Twenty-One Professor Travers
• Chapter Twenty-Two The Meaning of Life
• Chapter Twenty-Three The End
• Chapter Twenty-Four Epilogue: Mary Lives On
• References
• Published Books By P.L. Travers
• Bibliography
• Plates