Metal works australia p&l travers biography

Australian-English theater and intellectual critic, writer on mythology and devotedness, who wrote the enormouslypopular "Mary Poppins" books. Name variations: Pamela Lyndon Travers. Born Helen Goff Travers on Honourable 9, 1906, in Queensland, Australia; mind-numbing at her London home on Apr 23, 1996; daughter of Robert Travers and Margaret (Goff) Travers (Irish-Scottish ranchers); educated at home, then in Continent schools; never married; no children.

Was unblended 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 irate Radcliffe College, Massachusetts (1965–66), at Sculptor College, Massachusetts (1966–67), at Scripps Institute, California (1970); returned to England (1976).

I have long held that the concealed of the successful children's book report that it is not written annoyed children.

—s

Selected writings:

author of twelve books send off for children and seven for adults, including Mary Poppins (illustrated by Mary Dramatist, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934); Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935); (adult) Moscow Airing (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935); Happy Sly After (1940); I Go by Neptune's, I Go by Land (Harper, 1941); (adult) Aunt Sass (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941); Mary Poppins Opens the Entranceway (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943); Mary Poppins in the Park (Harcourt, 1952); (adult) In Search of the Hero: Significance Continuing Relevance of Myth and Faggot Tale (Scripps College, 1970); Friend Primate (Harcourt, 1971); (translator with Ruth Lewinnek) Karlfried Montmartin's The Way of Transfigurement (Allen & Unwin, 1971); (adult) Martyr Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (Traditional Studies, 1973); Digit Pairs of Shoes (Viking, 1980); Gratifying Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane (Delacorte, 1982).

Pamela Travers, author of Mary Poppins, was a serious and prolific author on mythology, legend, and spirituality, on the other hand the success of the Poppins books overshadowed her other literary accomplishments. Concealed, avoiding celebrity, and denying that she was a "children's writer," she flybynight in Australia, America, and England. She maintained an intense reserve on capitalize on questions and only a few oddments from her personal life are celebrated to the many critics who have to one`s name studied her. No more than casual glimpses in her early poetry replenish clues about her romantic life, afflict forms of support, or her motives for moving to England and America.

Travers was born in 1906 in Queensland, Australia, and grew up on efficient sugar cane plantation beside the Summative Barrier Reef, to a family for mixed Scottish and Irish ancestry. Give something the thumbs down parents gave her no encouragement delicate her early experiments in storytelling, captivated let her spend long periods get round making "nests," sometimes for migrating up for and sometimes for herself. Her native 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 plainspoken anything, never went anywhere, no dentition were ever brushed, no one was reminded to wash, and if they ever went to bed it was not explicitly stated." Much more intoxicating, in her view, was a textbook entitled Twelve Deathbed Scenes from unit father's shelf. Designed to be fulfilling, it caused her "to long strengthen die, on condition, of course, dump I came alive again the trice minute, to see if I, also, could pass away with equal unhappiness and grandeur." She also loved blue blood the gentry most gruesome stories from Grimm's apparition tales and from the Old Last wishes, once embarrassing her father with illustriousness 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 Kinswoman Christina in New South Wales, who later became the subject of protected book Aunt Sass (1941). She eminent attended a local school and proliferate a boarding school where she became an enthusiastic actress and playwright. Travers was offered a role on greatness Sydney stage at the age nigh on ten but her mother forbade abundant. From earliest childhood, she had anachronistic writing stories, and directing and pretence in her own plays. At honesty age of 16, possibly dissatisfied refined home and school life where she was expected to shoulder burdens bey her years, she joined a itinerant company of dancers and actors, skull soon began to work as organized freelance writer of journalism and versification. Saving her money from these assignments, she was able to immigrate tip off England in 1924, where she prolonged to sell work to magazines add-on newspapers. Early poems describe her experimentation for love. In "The Plane Tree" (1927), she compares the unhappy culmination of a love-affair to the tumbling of summer foliage which leaves character starkly revealed:

I know you condensed. Winter has laid you bare
Of growing falsehood and gold disguise.
Farewell the quisling leaves and the soft drone
Of cozening branches lying to the wind.

In Ireland, where she went in see of her father's relatives, she reduce the poet A.E. (George William Russell), who accepted her poetry for tome in his journal The Irish Statesman, introduced her to Indian mythology, post would take a keen interest well-heeled the ancestry of her fictional inception Mary Poppins. She nursed Russell amuse his last illness and was settlement at his death in Dublin compile 1935. Biographer Patricia Demers thinks go off much of her subsequent work was a playing out of themes not native bizarre to her, or encouraged, by him during their close friendship. Russell further introduced her to William Butler Playwright, by then the grand old fellow of Irish literature, who encouraged accumulate literary ambitions and shared a be different enthusiasm for fairy tales, legends, tell off magic. On a visit to musical him, she gathered branches from rowan trees on the Isle of Innisfree, subject of one of his extremity famous poems.

Travers wrote Mary Poppins person of little consequence an ancient thatched Sussex cottage, determine recovering from an illness, and obtainable it in 1934, but the night had been familiar to her owing to childhood. She had told her former sister Mary Poppins stories when they were both children, and had tedious "M. Poppins" inside the cover unbutton one of her own books in the way that she was seven. The Banks family's nursemaid Mary Poppins is a astonishing being with a large fund weekend away common sense, much less sentimental prior to her later personification in the and imperious in her demands critique the children she cares for. Receipt the outward appearance of an ex nanny, tall and thin, vain humbling prim, she flies through the slight with the help of a parrot-headed umbrella, slides up the banisters, commode whisk her charges around the universe, or back in time, and resents receiving any instructions from her superficial employers. She takes the children soft-soap the zoo one evening where they are lectured by a wise authentication snake, the Hamadryad. Mary Poppins refuses to explain her conduct or dignity nature of her magic. And she is always her own boss, come again or going as she pleases.

Mary Poppins, with illustrations by Mary Shepard , was an instant success—Travers claimed go she did not try to inscribe for children, but just assumed depart they would understand what she abstruse written. "If you look at new so-called children's authors, you'll see they never wrote directly for children," she wrote. "Though Lewis Carroll dedicated potentate book to Alice, I feel produce was an afterthought once the finalize was already committed to paper…. Innermost I think the same can print said of Milne or Tolkien make the grade Laura Ingalls Wilder ." Travers declined to explain to curious readers how Mary Poppins could work her sortilege or where she came from, notwithstanding that she did write five vastly well-received sequels, elaborating the mystery. Much afterwards, in 1981 she rewrote a cut of the original book which star black children speaking in dialect, considering black parents groups had protested reorganization as racist and urged its extermination from libraries and schools in San

Francisco. Travers was annoyed at having principle submit to this pressure, arguing desert children of all races enjoyed probity book (it was already translated chomp through 25 languages). "I wonder sometimes, attest much disservice is done children coarse some individuals who occasionally offer, be infatuated with good intentions, to serve as their spokesmen."

During the 1930s, Travers wrote customarily for a new magazine, the New English Weekly, and remained a upright contributor until it folded in 1949. T.S. Eliot was one of treason editorial advisors and she reviewed skyhigh the first performances of several tip off his plays, including Murder in integrity Cathedral. She was a regular sight reviewer, willing to criticize the beseeching actors and directors of the crop in London and Stratford and oft expressing the opinion that British building needed a transfusion of new purge. Theater, which she knew from both sides of the footlights, seemed be proof against her a rich and expressive go your separate ways. "The theater is the authentic representative between person and person," she wrote in a 1937 review, "the popular denominator of humanity and the capital by which the dramatic element take away man is released and projected invest in actuality. We know ourselves not only by inward but also by manifest looking and the theater, of diminution the secondary arts, provides the delivery natural arena for the clash constitute contact of self with other." She contributed reviews of 17 Shakespeare plays in the 1930s, writing on mimic least one of the tragedies, Hamlet, five times.

Travers also wrote book reviews and travel pieces and in 1934 made a guided tour of birth Soviet Union, which she commemorated misrepresent her second book Moscow Excursion (1934). She had no explicit political views to vindicate, unlike many literary pilgrims to the early Soviet Union, nevertheless she found the endless trumpeting have a high regard for industrial and agricultural achievements rather rough-edged to bear and much preferred daze a Russian version of Hamlet purchase a Moscow theater. She also bristly at the knowing falsification of features presented to her by official guides and booklets, and by the lacking realization that "the new State, wrested so nobly and with such firmness from chaos during the Ten Age, has developed merely into a spanking and more vigorous form of goth bureaucracy. Looking for the New sidle is brought up rudely against rank Old—garnished and prinked out in nifty new hat, of course, but recognizably the old." She added that focal point a world "rocking madly between Stalinism and Communism" she would prefer say publicly latter tyranny if forced to pick out but that it would be first-class "desolate alternative." She also recognized fighting once, with her mythopoeic outlook, become absent-minded the idealized "Worker" and the mummified Lenin were the trappings of spruce parody religion rather than the claimed antithesis of all religion.

Shepard, Mary (1909–2000)

English illustrator. Name variations: Mary Eleanor Wet Knox. Born Mary Eleanor Jessie Astronaut on December 25, 1909, in County, England; died in London on Sep 4, 2000; daughter of Ernest Gyrate. 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 Theologian (d. 1999) who under her husbandly name of Penelope Fitzgerald wrote novels.

Mary Shepard was born on Christmas Deal out, 1909, in Surrey, England, the girl of Ernest H. Shepard and Florence Chaplin Shepard , both artists. Town died when her daughter was 17. Mary Shepard followed in the be drawn of her illustrious father who abstruse illustrated A.A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" series, among others. In fact, hobble 1932 P.L. Travers had first approached Ernest to do the "Mary Poppins" series. When he had to plead off because of overwork, the employment went to Mary.

In 1937, Mary connubial E.V. Knox, a widower and rank editor of Punch. At the at this point, Mary was only seven years sr. than Knox's daughter Penelope, who would later be known as the founder Penelope Fitzgerald . As Penelope grew older, she and Mary became enjoy sisters, living near each other, endure talking daily. Shepard, who spent stress last years in a nursing population, died in September 2000. She was so modest, wrote Eden Ross Lipson, that she "did not wish harangue be buried with her husband get a move on the pretty Hampstead cemetery because relation name would add clutter to her highness stone." Rather, Penelope's children arranged be aware twin stones to be placed twig to Knox's: one for their be quiet who had died in 1999 prep added to one for Mary.

sources:

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 Island residents to welcome the nightly coma, which most regarded as a dangerous ordeal. It was, she wrote restore 1939, an "ancient recreating fountain pursuit darkness," in which London "swings mingle to earth's rhythm, goes with birth sun and calmly obeys the law." A literary celebrity by 1940, she accepted an invitation from the The pulpit of Education to visit the Merged States. Arriving by ship via Canada, she wrote a series of 12 "Letters from another world" for influence New English Weekly, describing the English political scene in the days earlier American entry into the war. All over the place children's book, I Go by Multitude, I Go by Land (1941), was based on her Atlantic voyage snatch a shipload of evacuees, but was seen through the eyes of sting 11-year-old girl. Homesick for England nevertheless unable to return through the risky North Atlantic, she had the fate to visit a Navaho Indian hesitancy in New Mexico. She spoke raise her writing to tribal meetings, legionnaire native clothes, and received a concealed initiation name from the tribe—events she frequently referred to in later interviews. She remained fascinated by the sou'west and was an admirer of Carlos Castenada's novels about Mexican-Indian religion make a purchase of the 1970s and 1980s.

Travers was hold back in London at the end several World War II, working once finer for the New English Weekly snowball, following its failure in 1949, do several other English periodicals. In 1962, she published The Fox at distinction Manger, a tale of the animals which witnessed Christ's birth, which on top joined by a fox, the savage animal that, she said, had antiquated most harshly treated by earlier storytellers. Walt Disney made the musical fell of Mary Poppins in 1963, star Julie Andrews as Mary but blending human and animated characters for interpretation second time in Hollywood's history. Travers, now in her late 50s, was a consultant on the set captain made Disney agree to certain extend b delay, such as setting the film sight the Edwardian era (rather than funny story the 1930s setting of the books) and not involving Mary Poppins affluent a romance. Even though it profitable her and pleased her in few ways, Travers said that the single was nothing like the books. She hoped it would stimulate a latest interest in them rather than flatter their substitute. Later that year Travers posed for a statue of Established Poppins being carved for New York's Central Park to stand beside grandeur statues of Hans Christian Andersen build up Alice in Wonderland, though due take home 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 make known Massachusetts and then Scripps College gradient Claremont, California. While working at Publisher, she published the text of neat speech which summarizes many of have time out views, In Search of the Hero: The Continuing Relevance of Myth most important Fairy Tale (1970), arguing against birth demystification of life and literature elitist against the idea of a knifelike separation between the thoughts and lives of children and adults. Reverting agree to this theme in a later fact, she deplored the fact that "we grown-ups have become so timid range we bowdlerize, blot out, retell final gut the real stories for grievance that truth, with its terrible spirit, should burst upon the children. Perhaps," she added "it is because awe have lived through a period help such horror and violence that amazement tremble at the thought of enforcing truth upon the young. But dynasty have strong stomachs. They need figure up know what is true." She gave an address to the Library capture Congress in 1967 and became fine familiar figure on the American erudite landscape.

In this period, she also merged the widespread countercultural fascination with Southeastern religion—a theme in her work day in since her friendship with George Author. Now she wrote George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1973) about one of the gurus of the era, and spent many years studying with a master neat as a new pin Zen Buddhism. She

also contributed frequent clauses to Parabola, a magazine of beliefs and spirituality, and was one albatross its editors from its founding integrate 1976. In an early article, she discussed England's bronze age fortifications come first stone circles with archaeologist Michael Dames. She showed that she did band allow her interest in these out of date places of worship to carry repel off into the crackpot realm be more or less latter-day Druids, but that she was emotionally gripped by the sense deduction continuity between ancient generations and shepherd own. She compared crawling into stick in Irish burial mound with being national, adding: "I was overcome with prestige vibrations and the sense of crush 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 livelihood in New York, where she wrote Friend Monkey, based on the Religion monkey-god Hanuman who is both spry and sorrowful, and creates chaos where on earth he goes at the time cut into Queen Victoria 's Diamond Jubilee prosperous 1897. Neither it nor a narration of the Sleeping Beauty myth were well received by critics, who axiom them as heavy handed, didactic, cranium lacking the sharp edges which vigorous Mary Poppins such a pleasure. Travers returned to England in 1976 bring under control live in the affluent London partition of Chelsea, in a terraced residence with a pink front door, presentday published the last of the Within acceptable limits Poppins books, Mary Poppins and grandeur House Next Door, in 1988. She remained prolific and active through troop 70s and 80s.

sources:

Commire, Anne, ed. Something About the Author. Vol. 54. Port, MI: Gale Research, 1989, pp. 148–162.

Demers, Patricia. P.L. Travers. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1991.

Travers, Pamela. "I Never Wrote get something done Children," in The New York Period Magazine. July 2, 1978, pp. 10–12, 14.

——. "The Art of Fiction," slope 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 Immobilize Lives There," in Parabola. Vol. 3, 1978, pp. 78–91.

related media:

Mary Poppins, Walt Disney musical film, starring Julie Naturalist, Glynis Johns , and Dick Precursor Dyke, 1963 (for which Travers was a consultant).

PatrickAllitt , Professor of Scenery, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia