Tag: books

About a Forthcoming Biography of P.L. Travers 

Dear Reader, 

A new biography of P.L. Travers is scheduled for release in 2025 by Pen & Swords, a British publisher specializing in history and true crime. The author of this biography is Elisabeth Galvin, a British journalist and author who currently resides with her family in Brisbane, Australia.   

Last year after discovering this blog, Elisabeth reached out to me, sparking a correspondence that eventually, to my delight, culminated in my contribution of a chapter about P.L. Travers’s spiritual beliefs. 

Elisabeth Galvin has written two other biographies of famous children’s writers. The first one, “The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit”, which will be the subject of this blog post, was published in 2018.   The second, “The Real Kenneth Graham”, was published in 2021.  

P.L. Travers was in her own words “a tremendous Nesbit fan” and read her books again and again even as an adult.  

I think so highly of her, and I’m absolutely sure that such writers as C.S. Lewis, for instance, good though his books are, could never have existed without Nesbit.” 

Transcripts of A Talk About Sorrow, July 1965 

P.L. Travers and Janet Rance 

Elisabeth Galvin drew some interesting similarities between the two writers during a recent conversation we had, and I’ve decided to share some snippets of it here for the benefit of the readers of this blog. But just before, let me provide a brief note about the life of E. Nesbit for those of you who are not familiar with her work.  

E. (Edith) Nesbit was an English author and poet. She was born in 1858 and died in 1924, the year when P. Travers first came to London, so the two women never met.  Edith lost her father when she was only four years old and had to change homes and schools often as her mother traveled frequently to France and Spain seeking a cure to the ailments of Edith’s older sister Mary.  

Edith married Hubert Bland who later became an influential socialist journalist and with whom she co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

She wrote numerous short stories, poems and novels both for children and adults. Her most well-known works for children include “The Railway Children”, “Five Children and It”, “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, “The Phoenix and the Carpet”, and “The Enchanted Castle”. 

Her ability to blend fantasy with everyday experiences resonated with readers and contributed to the evolution of children’s literature and as such had a significant influence on later writers, including C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson. 

Now to my conversation with Elisabeth Galvin.  

LS: Why did you choose to write a biography about E. Nesbit? 

EG: Well, I always wanted to be an author, and I became a magazine journalist, and I absolutely loved my job. Then, when the opportunity came to submit some ideas for biographies about children’s authors to a publisher, I knew I had to take that chance. I thought about all the stories that I loved when I was younger, and Railway Children was one of my favorite stories.  I still have the book that my parents gave me, a red leather-bound book with a gold spine – it’s such a lovely story, and E. Nesbit led such an interesting life as well, and I believe that is why I chose to write about her.   

LS: Yes, she did have a tumultuous life, and I really enjoyed reading your book because you recreate the atmosphere of that period so vividly. I imagine you had to visit some of the places you write about in your book.   Could you share some insights into your research process for the book?  

EG: Yes, of course. It was an exciting process because as a journalist, I love meeting and talking with people and exploring different places. A notable experience was visiting Well Hall, where E. Nesbit lived with her family for some twenty years. I had the privilege of exploring it in the company of a member of the E. Nesbit Society, which truly brought the whole experience to life. We walked around Well Hall; while the original house was demolished in 1930, parts of the original gardens still remain and I saw the wooden statues portraying characters from E. Nesbit’s books, so yes, her spirit was definitely there. 

(Picture taken from “The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit” by Elisabeth Galvin. Dame Jacqueline Wilson at Well Hall unveiling the wooden sculpture of the Psammead, commissioned by the E. Nesbit Society in 2013.)

I visited another one of E. Nesbit’s residences, Halstead Hall in Kent (click on the link to see the pictures). It was one of her childhood’s homes. It was lovely, it had the quintessential English garden and that is where she loved to spend time reading during her teenage years. I think she was 13 when she was there.  The vicar who lived in the village at that time lent her his books and that is when she first came across Shakespeare.  I could imagine this impressionable young girl lying in her garden looking at the apple trees and the roses and get a picture of her character, so it was very helpful going to those places. 

Surprisingly, after E. Nesbit’s death, her personal papers were sold to The University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. She never went to America but was published there too, so I had to go there. I spent five intense days reading letters and other materials from the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds and then suddenly came outside to see a Taco Bell and fire engines. It was a funny experience.   

LS: Yes, I can imagine, it sounds like a real time travelling experience. Now, what proved to be the most difficult part in writing the book? 

EG: The most difficult was knowing that I would never meet her, or talk to her or hear her voice, or ask her questions. A lot of biographies really are speculation, even if it is unintentional, your natural biases do come out. As a journalist you always want to tell the truth and be as fair as you can, and there is a sense of responsibility when delving into someone else’s life. 

LS: Definitely, and this also applies to P.L. Travers, especially considering she did not want people to inquire about her private affairs. You mentioned previously that during your research on both women you noticed certain similarities between them. Could you tell us more? 

EG: Well, it is amazing, actually.  The more you think about it, the more similarities there are – both physically and in terms of their personalities. The way they approach life, the events that unfolded in their early childhood as well as their literary works exhibit striking similarities.  

Firstly, both were very tall women with short curly hair. They possessed a somewhat androgynous appearance, attracting men and women. They were both, in a sense, single parents.  E. Nesbit was married, but her husband was not particularly supportive. 

They both had a “get up and go” attitude toward life. They experienced significant hardships, losing their fathers at a young age, and both had a nomadic childhood—P.L. Travers throughout Australia, and E. Nesbit across Europe, attending school in France and Spain.  

Despite the disarray of their early years, they shared a deep love for reading, voraciously consuming any available books. Their affection for Shakespeare and a natural flair for writing emerged early in their lives. Both harbored aspirations to become poets, and perhaps even experienced a tinge of disappointment for not receiving the recognition they desired. 

And they both wrote about ordinary children and everyday magic. Their skill was to remember what it was to be a child and to transpose the essence of childhood into their writings. And I don’t know if it is because they had such unusual childhoods, losing a parent at a very young age, but they always had an idealized version of family life.  

LS: Do you think they would have gotten along if they had met? 

EG: I am sure they would have had a lot in common to talk about. E. Nesbit loved bohemian parties and thrived on that kind of energy. Similarly, P.L. Travers loved to meet new people and make new friends. They were not solo writers, they loved sharing their knowledge and taking part in artistic gatherings.  

And I believe they would have connected on the fairy tale aspect as well. P.L. Travers wrote about Sleeping Beauty in the 1970s, and E. Nesbit was also deeply interested in fairy tales, writing her own collection of fairy stories. 

LS: I agree, they would have had a lot to talk about. They even shared common acquaintances, George Bernard Shaw for example. Their lives and literary contributions provide an endless well of discussion and we can go on for hours.

I want to thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with the readers of the Mary Poppins Effect blog, and I hope to share more about our collaboration and your forthcoming biography of P.L. Travers in the coming months. 

Christmas with P.L. Travers and Andersen 

Hello Dear Reader,  

The idea for this blogpost came to me a few days ago as I was rereading a fairy tale “The Fir Tree” from one of my old childhood books, “Andersen’s Fairy Tales” (Bulgarian translation). Above is a picture of my tattered old book, it is missing some pages and that is not surprising at all because the glue is mostly gone, and the pages no longer hold together.  

In fact, this is not the actual copy I had as a child, but it is the exact edition which I found thanks to the Internet and ordered all the way to Canada. This book was published in 1977 and was illustrated by Lyuben Zidarov who, apparently, was the oldest working illustrator in Bulgaria, and who died this year at the venerable age of 100.

In all honesty these were not my favorite illustrations, I have other books in my childhood collection of fairy tales with illustrations which I enjoyed much more as a child. Looking now at Zidarov’s illustrations I can appreciate their beauty and his childlike vision and technique, but as a child I did not want to look at pictures that reminded me of my own drawings which I always found rather disappointing because they never looked like what I had in mind.  

Reading Andersen’s fairy tales as a child is something that I share with P.L. Travers. She writes in “The Black Sheep”, an essay first published in The New York Times in 1965 and then republished in her last book “What the Bee Knows”, about enjoying his stories as a child, “I even wallowed in it, yet I never could quite understand why I felt no better for it.” she writes.  

As an adult and writer, herself, P.L. Travers did not appreciate the tortures Anderson inflicted on his fictional characters; these torments she perceived to be disguised as piety and to have a demoralizing effect on the reader. The other reproach she made to Andersen was that he never invented a strong villain, that all he wrote about were white sheep, “…some clean, some dirty, but a homogenous flock”. She preferred, she wrote, the strong contrast of the Grimm’s fairy tales. 

I tend to agree with P.L Travers on many things and she has been a great posthumous teacher for me. Yet, when it comes to Andersen, we seem to hold different views. Andersen’s fairy tales are undoubtedly heart-wrenching, but there is so much meaning in them, and he possessed such an incredible talent as a storyteller that I find it difficult to conceive that she was oblivious to it all. Sometimes I wonder if she genuinely meant her harsh critique, or if she enjoyed expressing strong opinions to shock the reader and prompt reflection.  

And I see a connection here that I would have loved to discuss with P.L. Travers. Andersen seems to teach through pain; his use of emotional torture aims to awaken the reader to a deeper truth. I wish I could ask P.L. Travers how his technique differs from the one used by her beloved spiritual teacher Gurdjieff who said that one can only awaken through conscious suffering?  

When I first read “The Fir Tree” as a child, I thought it was a sad and strange New Year’s Eve story about a New Year’s tree abandoned in the attic after the celebrations and later burned outside in the yard. (I say New Year because in the 1980’s we did not celebrate Christmas in Bulgaria; religion was forbidden by the communist regime. Instead, we celebrated the New Year and decorated a fir tree, and Santa Clause was not Santa Clause but Father Frost.) Anyhow, I simply turned the page and conveniently forgot about the story of the fir tree, as I couldn’t fathom a New Year’s Eve without a New Year’s tree in the house. It was that easy.   

But it was not that easy the second time around. As I reread the story I almost agreed with P.L. Travers on the subject of Andersen. It made me so very sad, and I wanted to be joyful – it is Christmas after all, the most joyful time of the year. Why take a Christmas tree and use it as a metaphor for our fleeting lives and our inability to appreciate the moment?

For some reason, I couldn’t just forget about it as I closed the pages of the book. I felt really upset, but then, I should have known better than to read a story by Andersen during the Holidays, especially one that I knew had a sad ending. I knew it was not fair for me to be upset with Andersen; it was not like he had forced the book into my hands. There was only one thing I could do to free myself from the strong emotions, and that was to write this post.  

I will summarize the story briefly here for those of you who are not familiar with it. It is about a small fir tree so eager to grow up and be like the other tall fir trees in the forest that it does not notice the fresh air and the sunshine, nor the birds and the rabbits playing around it, or the pink clouds in the sky. However, it does notice that sometimes the tall fir trees get cut down and taken away to some mysterious place, and it wants to know where.   

One day, the sparrows tell the little fir tree that they had seen the greatest splendor imaginable through the windows in town. They had seen fir trees beautifully decorated with gilded apples, gingerbread, toys and candles standing in the middle of warm rooms. The fir tree begins to long for a warm room in town.   

The day comes when the fir-tree is finally cut down and taken to a house. Nets cut out of colored paper and filled with sweets are hung on its branches. Gilded apples and walnuts are fastened to the tree, and many colorful candles are fixed to its branches. The tree begins to anticipate what happens next and  longs for the candles to be lit. All the questioning and longing cause the bark of the tree to ache, much like a headache would have done had the tree been human instead. 

Then the candles are lit, the children come and take down the sweets and the toys hung on the branches, and the whole thing is over before the tree can even realize it. The next day, the tree is thrown in the attic where it stays for many days. The tree is sad and lonely, but one day, mice come to see it, and it begins to tell them the story of its life – where it came from and how it got to the house. All the while, it realizes that what it had was wonderful; only it did not know it back then.  Not long after, the tree is taken outside and is chopped and burned in the fire under a large copper. The End.  

There is such a profound truth in this story, yet those who can truly feel the sadness of it are probably those who had gone through enough of life to awaken to the realization that all stories come to an end, and there is nothing else but the present moment. I wonder if those who need the lesson can get it from a story, or is it that we always need to learn from experience? This too is a question that I would have loved to ask P.L. Travers? 

I cannot say I was much wiser than the fir tree when I was younger, and it is perhaps my own grief over time wasted in futile projections that made me react so strongly when I read the story. A consolation, at least, is that we do not have a real Christmas tree in our home. I decided many years ago that it was a waste to cut down a living tree just to decorate it for a few days and then discard it without a second thought. I decided to not participate in this trade, and I wonder now, was my decision somehow influenced unconsciously by this story that I had read as a child? I think now that it is possible.

May you all fully enjoy the present moment this Christmas without projecting into the future or into the past. Although, in some cases, as in the case of Scrooge, that may be advisable… After all, what do I know? 

Merry Christmas! 

Christmas with “Hansel and Gretel” 

One of the many Mary Poppins effects in my personal life was the sudden desire to retrieve the long-lost books from my childhood spent in Bulgaria in the 1980’s. This old pop-up edition of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (1979) is the newest addition to my reassembled collection.  

The gorgeous illustrations are by Vojtěch Kubašta, a Czech architect, graphic artist, children’s book illustrator and master of the pop-up book. He was the illustrator of the unsigned series of pop-up books tied to “Bambi,” “101 Dalmatians” and other Walt Disney films.  

Of course, as a child I wasn’t aware of the authors and illustrators of my beloved books. What mattered then were the stories and the pictures. This is still true, but in addition, I am now fascinated by the creative spirit behind the creations. 

I loved fairy tales as a child, and the beautiful illustrations that accompanied these stories heightened my earliest reading experiences. In fact, they are probably the reason why I remember how I felt when I first read them. Going back to these stories as an adult however is an entirely different experience.  

The story of “Hansel and Gretel” is a perfect example. As a child I simply enjoyed the story for the story. Two children get lost in the forest, find a house made from sweets and candy, they get trapped and are about to be eaten by an evil witch, when one of them plays a trick on her and sends her into the flames of her oven. Good triumphs over evil, and the ending is happy as the two siblings find their way back home.  

Rereading the story now reveals a much deeper meaning that I could not have grasped back then for the obvious reason that I lacked both life experience and understanding of symbols and metaphors.  

I would have loved to have the opportunity to discuss “Hansel and Gretel” with P.L. Travers. She wrote about it briefly in her essay “The Fairy -Tale as Teacher”: 

Hansel and Gretel. How it beguiles the child with its lollipop house and peppermint doorstep! For us, however, this is only the lure. The trap, the real secret, is the journey through the wood. If you want to find your home, it says (back to the beginnings, becoming as little children) you must scatter something less ephemeral than peas or rose-leaves. Birds will eat one, and the wind will blow the other away. Only by making the path with pebbles – enduring, hardly found, indestructible – can you pick up the trail and escape the witch’s oven which is extinction.   

I agree with P.L. Travers that the real secret to the story is the journey through the forest. Yet, what saves the children from the witch’s oven are not the pebbles, but their own cunning; and what leads them back home is a white bird… 

For me “Hansel and Gretel” is a story about growing up, survival and tapping into one’s own inner resourcefulness. The message for me is that one cannot use cunning (the pebbles, the rose-petals and breadcrumbs) to avoid the adventure of growing up (the forest), but one must use cunning to survive an ordeal. 

The children had to get lost and trapped. They had to learn about evil and danger and how to face it all on their own. It is all about seizing the moment and doing what needs to be done – which is to shove the witch into the fires of the oven – all, without any hesitation. After facing something so terrible and surviving it – who needs pebbles to find their way back home?  

Now, what does this story have to do with Christmas? Well, actually it is not the story itself that has to do with Christmas, but a prop from it: the house made of sweets.  

Gingerbread houses originated in Germany during the 16th century, but their popularity rose when the Brothers Grimm wrote the story of “Hansel and Gretel” in 1812. It is believed that it sparked a creative renaissance amongst German bakers; apparently a house made of cake and candy is not alluring only to children! With time the cookie-walled houses became associated with Christmas and spread throughout Europe and North America.  

We did not have gingerbread houses in Bulgaria when I was a child. I got acquainted with them only when we came to Canada in the 1990’s, but now the decorating of a gingerbread house has become a well-established family tradition, and each year it invariably reminds me  of the time when I first read the story of “Hansel and Gretel” and gazed at Kubasta’s beautiful illustrations wishing I could too have a taste of the witch’s house.  

I wonder, does Christmas bring back warm memories from your childhood too? I sincerely hope that it does!