9 August 2021 Susannah

9 August 1899: P.L. Travers is born

PL Travers & Mary Poppins

In the early 1940s, Walt Disney made a promise to his daughter to make her favourite book, Mary Poppins, into a movie, but P.L. Travers was not easily persuaded. It took Disney almost 20 years to change her mind.

During World War I, a young girl named Lyndon Goff was a boarder at the northern Sydney girls’ school, Loreto College in Normanhurst. When she grew up she produced one of the most popular series of books for children to this day.

P.L. Travers was an Australian writer best remembered as the author of the Mary Poppins books. She was born in Maryborough, Queensland on 9 August 1899 and named Helen Lyndon Goff. Her father, Travers Robert Goff, was an unsuccessful bank manager due to his alcoholism, and her mother was Margaret Agnes Goff. The family lived a simple life in a large home during the first years of her life. You can see photos from my visit to this house here.

Her father died in 1907 when she was 7 years old and the family moved to Bowral, New South Wales. Goff had a vivid imagination as a child, and a love of reading, preferring fairy tales and myths. Her writing was first published when she was a teenager, and she also worked briefly as a professional Shakespearean actor.

At age 25 she emigrated to England and took the name ‘Pamela Lyndon Travers’, and the pen name P. L. Travers while writing the first of eight Mary Poppins books in 1933. She only returned once to visit Australia, for two weeks in 1963.

The Mary Poppins books were extremely popular from the start. Besides being entertaining and stimulating, the books seamlessly blend fantasy and everyday elements. Travers never thought of them as being exclusively for children.

When she was first approached by Disney in 1945, she resisted for many years, making demands on Disney’s production plans. However, in 1959, largely for financial reasons, she relented and finally agreed to sell the rights. But even after serving as a consultant during the production period, she was dissatisfied with the final film which premiered in 1964.

Travers never married, but in 1939, when she was 40, she adopted a baby boy from Ireland. She was always reluctant to share details about her personal life.

P.L. Travers died in London on 23 April 1996 at the age of 96. Although she never fully accepted the Disney film version of Mary Poppins, the film did make her rich.

Featured image credit- PL Travers & Mary Poppins, from https://www.quora.com/