FREE: Mary Poppins She Wrote The Life of PL Travers

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By Valerie Lawson

Explores the events that inspired the major motion picture--Disney's SAVING MR BANKS

The spellbinding stories of Mary Poppins, the quintessentially English and utterly magical nanny, have been loved by generations. She flew into the lives of the unsuspecting Banks family in a children's book that was instantly hailed as a classic, then became a household name when Julie Andrews stepped into the title role in Walt Disney's hugely successful and equally classic film. But the remarkable Mary Poppins creator, as a definitive biography reveals, is equally remarkable. The fabulous English nanny was actually conceived by Pamela Lyndon Travers, an Australian who came to London in 1924 as a journalist. She became involved with theosophy, traveled in the literary circles of WB Yeats, and TS Eliot and became a disciple of the famed spiritual guru Gurdjieff.

She famously clashed with Walt Disney over the adaptation of the Mary Poppins books into film. Travers, whom Disney accused of vanity for "thinking you know more about Mary Poppins than I do," as a tart and opinionated as Julie Andrew's big -screen Mary Poppins was cheery. Yet it was a love of mysticism and magic that shaped Travers's life as well as the character of Maary Poppins. The clipped, strict and ultimately mysterious nanny who emerged from her pen was the creation of someone who remained inscrutable and enigmatic to the end of her ninety-six years.
Valerie Lawson's illuminating biography provides the first full look into one of the most original literary minds of the 20th century.