I feel like “Lucky Thursday,” one of the stories in Mary Poppins in the Park (the fourth book in the series) published in 1952, is the perfect story to revisit during this misty time of year. Hopefully you will find my musings entertaining enough to forget the grey hues of November at least for a little while.
“Lucky Thursday,” is one of four stories in the Mary Poppins books in which P.L. Travers explores the tricky nature of wishes and the unsettling truth that they sometimes come true in ways we never intended. However, as much as this theme deserves a deeper dive and one that I will certainly take on another occasion, in this post I want to show you something a bit different. I want to tell you about a curious connection between the eerie elements in this Mary Poppins story and a French fairy tale written by Madame d’Aulnoy in the late seventeenth century.
In “Lucky Thursday,” Michael Banks, who has been stuck alone all day with a cold in the nursery, makes three wishes on the first star in the night sky. The next day, strange events begin to unfold, but he does not realize the connection between them and the wishes he made the night before in a moment of frustration until it is almost too late. One of his three wishes is to be far away from his siblings. That wish is granted, and he soon finds himself in a very strange place, as you will see.
I did not have the chance to read Mary Poppins in the Park as a child. My copy of Mary Poppins included only the first two books in the series, so I cannot compare my reading experiences, but the strong uncanny elements in “Lucky Thursday” impressed me even as an adult reader. I couldn’t stop wondering how on earth P. L. Travers dreamed up the idea of an alien abduction of Michael Banks who lands on a planet ruled by cats. (You see, practical questions like this often pop into my head while I’m stuck in traffic on my daily commute.) For a long time, and until quite recently, I had no answer to this question as P. L. Travers was famously private about the inspiration behind her stories.
Let me give you a little bit of context. After a day stuck in the nursery, Michael Banks is feeling better and joins Mary Poppins and his siblings on their usual visit to the Park. There, while Mary Poppins sits quietly reading What a Lady Should Know, he takes a silver whistle from her open handbag without asking permission and strolls farther into the park, where he can enjoy playing with it undisturbed.
A cat with a “black and yellow coat” that “shone in the sunny mist, more like dapples of light and shadow than ordinary fur,” which Michael had noticed on the windowsill the night before, guides him farther into the Park. A steaming vapor rises from the earth and envelops them both. Prompted by the cat, Michael jumps into the air and suddenly feels himself lifted upward into empty space. Moments later, he lands on the steps of a golden palace on the Cat Planet, which turns out to be the very first star on which he had made his three wishes the night before.
The golden castle is inhabited by the Cat King, the Cat Queen, their three daughters, and many cat courtiers. At first, everything seems amusing to Michael until he is offered a meal of a dead mouse, a bat, and small raw fish, all served on golden plates, along with milk in a saucer. It is then that he realizes the cats are far from friendly. Soon after, he discovers the horrifying truth about his position at their court: all the cats’ food is prepared by enslaved children who, like him, had wished upon a star to be away from their families.
Michael is offered a chance to escape his predicament, but only if he can solve three riddles. Should he succeed, he is told, he must marry one of the King’s daughters. Michael finds the answers to the riddles easily enough, but he has no desire at all to marry a cat. His refusal is not well received by his hosts. The offended cats begin to hiss and close in on him, and they might have torn him to pieces had he not blown the silver whistle to summon Mary Poppins to his aid.
“Lucky Thursday” is a strange and uncanny story, and it is not impossible that P. L. Travers came up with the idea of a royal court of cats on her own. However, when I recently read Madame d’Aulnoy’s fairy tale The White Cat, the similarity of the setting made me wonder: could P. L. Travers, who was deeply immersed in fairy tale lore, have borrowed this motif from Madame d’Aulnoy’s tale? Writers often draw inspiration from one another. Human creativity does not exist in a vacuum, for ideas, like bees, cross-pollinate among our minds.
The fairy tale The White Cat unfolds in a distant kingdom where a prince, sent on a quest by his father, meets the White Cat, a princess presiding over a court of cats and bodiless hands serving as attendants. Unlike Michael, the prince is offered human food while the cats dine on dead mice and the White Cat helps the prince in his quest. He eventually falls in love with her and when he declares his love, she asks him to cut off her head and tail. He initially refuses to do so, but at last he complies, and by doing so, he breaks the spell that bound her, revealing that the White Cat is, in fact, a princess.
The similarities between the settings in these two stories, a golden palace in one and a castle of gleaming gemstones in the other, each with a royal court of cats and both situated in distant locations, are too striking in my opinion to be mere coincidence.
As is often the case with P. L. Travers, one question leads to another. If she knew about the fairy tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, why didn’t she mention her in her writings? She often spoke of the Brothers Grimm. A possible explanation might be that she dismissed Madame d’Aulnoy because she was inventing her stories rather than retelling old tales from anonymous sources, as the Brothers Grimm did.
But little did she know that even the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault had taken inspiration from Madame d’Aulnoy and her circle of women writers, who called themselves “the fairies” and were, in fact, the first to coin the term fairy tales.
I learned about Madame D’Aulnoy and the other fairies, Henriette-Julie Murat, Charlotte-Rose La Force, Marie-Jeanne L’Heriter, Catherine Bernard, Catherine Duran and Louise D’Auneil from Jane Harrington’s wonderful new book Women of the Fairy Tale Resistence, The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun.
Harrington’s book is a must-read for any fairy tale aficionado. I was deeply fascinated to discover the lives of these women writers in Paris who challenged social norms during the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Their lives were far from easy, yet despite the many obstacles they faced, their voices sustained them. Although men tried to erase their names from history, their writings have endured, offering a vivid glimpse into their struggles to find true love and live happily ever after.
The research conducted by Harrington is truly remarkable. I was astonished to learn that Charles Perrault, whose fairy tales I devoured as a child (I still have my old Bulgarian editions), borrowed from her stories without giving her any credit. According to Harrington, L’Héritier often remarked that Perrault had plundered her work. One of the tales I loved as a child, “Diamonds and Toads,” is in fact a simplified retelling of “Blanche,” a story written by Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, who, incidentally, was also his relative.
I wonder what P. L. Travers would have thought of Harrington’s book and of the lives of these women writers. If she dismissed Madame d’Aulnoy because she was a writer of fairy tales rather than a “reteller,” that only adds to the paradoxes in Travers’s thinking. After all, she herself was a writer of fairy tales. Of course, she would have argued that the Mary Poppins stories are not fairy tales, and perhaps from an academic standpoint they do not fit the definition, not even as literary fairy tales, which are often written adaptations of stories from oral traditions.
P.L. Travers was influenced by myth, mysticism, and Gurdjieff’s spiritual teachings. She thought in mythic rather than folkloric terms, but her stories are an original combination of fairy-tale motifs with mythic cosmology and spiritual allegory.
In conclusion, the Mary Poppins stories are not traditional fairy tales but rather hybrid modern literary wonder tales that adapt the structure and spirit of fairy tales to explore mythic and metaphysical themes within a domestic setting. And this is why they are so fascinating to explore.
I wish I could talk about all this with P. L. Travers, but even if that were possible, there is no guarantee she would answer my questions.
After all, she was known for avoiding direct answers.
That’s it for now—thanks so much for reading! If this post brought you a little joy, go ahead and click the subscribe button in the bottom-right corner of your screen so you don’t miss any future posts. You can also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Substack for more peeks into the magical world of Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers, and other enchanting literary adventures.
This post continues the story about my first Mary Poppins–themed trip to London with my daughter in the summer of 2023. In last month’s post, I shared our visit to P. L. Travers’s former homes at 50 Smith Street and 29 Shawfield Street in Chelsea. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here.
In this blog post, we will visit St Paul’s Cathedral, stroll through Poppin’s Court near Fleet Street, shop for parrot-headed umbrellas at James Smith & Sons and admire the Mary Poppins statue in Leicester Square Gardens.
St Paul Cathedral, London
If you find yourself in London, a visit to St Paul’s Cathedral is, in my humble opinion, an absolute must. Its grandeur is astonishing—from the soaring colonnades to the magnificent domed ceiling—and the vast interior, adorned with intricate mosaics, takes your breath away the moment you step inside.
In The Bird Woman, Mary Poppins takes the Banks children to visit their father who works at the bank, where he, as described in the very first Mary Poppins story, East Wind, “sat on a large chair in front of a large desk and made money. All day long he worked, cutting out pennies and shillings and half-crowns and threepenny-bits.”
I wish the idea of looking up banks around St Paul’s Cathedral had occurred to me while I was there, but it didn’t—so this will have to go on my list for my next trip to London. I’m talking about the bank where I believe P. L. Travers imagined Mr. Banks working: the Ludgate Hill branch of the City Bank at 45–47 Ludgate Hill, which, according to Memoirs of a Metro Girl, is now a wine bar.
The picture above was taken by Metro Girl and is shared here with her permission 🙂
How do I know this was the bank P. L. Travers had in mind when she wrote “The Bird Woman”? Because she writes: ‘They were walking up Ludgate Hill on the way to pay a visit to Mr. Banks in the City.’
In The Bird Woman we learn that Mr. Banks is entirely absorbed in material pursuits and has no time for small pleasures. But we can hardly blame him—he is the sole provider for his ever-growing family (by the second book in the series, the Banks family counts five children). Hoping to offer him a rare moment of joy and respite, Mary Poppins and the children plan an outing for tea and Shortbread Fingers. Yet Jane and Michael are far more excited by the possibility of meeting the Bird Woman and her pigeons outside St Paul’s Cathedral than by the promised tea and shortbread.
Because of the sharp contrast between the Bird Woman’s quiet act of feeding the birds and Mr. Banks’s worldly occupation, The Bird Woman takes on a distinctly spiritual undertone for the adult reader. The doves, traditionally associated with the Holy Spirit in Christianity, serve here as a visual metaphor for the nourishment of the soul. Clearly, P.L. Travers is concerned with our human struggle to balance material responsibilities with the quest for spiritual fulfilment.
Yet for carefree Jane and Michael, the Bird Woman and her doves are simply companions to delight in and play with. For them, the magic of the day is found in this gentle, enchanting encounter—an experience that carries them beyond the ordinary and into a realm of wonder.
I love how P. L. Travers conveys Jane and Michael’s understanding of the doves, while at the same time revealing her own gift for remembering how to see the world through the eyes of the child she once was.
“There were fussy and chatty grey doves like Grand-mothers; and brown, rough-voiced pigeons like Uncles; and grey, cackling, no-I’ve-no-money-today pigeons like Fathers. And the silly, anxious, soft blue doves were like Mothers. That’s what Jane and Michael thought, anyway.”
Jane and Michael (and probably P.L. Travers) relate to the animal world far more naturally—and kindlier—than most adults. To them, the birds are not pests but companions, each a living being with its own character. We, on the other hand, tend to brush past pigeons and doves as if they were mere annoyances, hardly pausing to see them at all—too busy rushing for the train or speeding down the highway, intent on our own version of cutting pennies and shillings.
I experienced my own version of feeding the birds—not at St. Paul’s Cathedral, but in St. James’s Park. While we were there, a little girl, slightly older than Jane and Michael Banks, had a bag full of seeds. She was not only feeding the birds but also offering seeds to passersby who, like me, wanted to join in the experience. It was deeply touching, and here is a short clip of me feeding the birds.
Feeding the birds in St. Jame’s Park
Many of the characters in the Mary Poppins stories—if not all—have their roots in the real-life experiences and encounters of P.L. Travers. She rarely revealed these inspirations openly, though hints occasionally surfaced in interviews she gave throughout her long writing career.
I have never come across an interview in which P. L. Travers spoke about the origin of the Bird Woman. However, I did find an old picture of a man standing outside St Paul’s, his arms and shoulders alive with pigeons as he feeds them. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, while working as a freelance journalist near Fleet Street, P. L. Travers often passed by St Paul’s Cathedral, and I can’t help but wonder whether this man might have been the true inspiration behind the Bird Woman.
St Paul’s Cathedral, as P.L. Travers writes in The Bird Woman, was built long ago by “A man with a bird’s name. Wren it was, but he was no relation to Jenny.” That man, of course, was Sir Christopher Wren, England’s most celebrated architect of his day. When my daughter and I visited St Paul’s Cathedral in the summer of 2023, we saw a lovely exhibit inside about Sir Christopher Wren and the reconstruction of the building after the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Wren designed the Great Model of the cathedral in 1672–73. The version you see in the picture below was executed by William Cleere and a team of thirteen joiners. This design differed from the original in style, evolving from the “Greek Cross” plan by extending the nave and adding a domed bell tower.
King Charles II, who awarded the reconstruction contract to Wren, requested a slight modification: the domed bell tower had to be replaced with a traditional spire. But Wren was not a man easily discouraged. Once the plans were approved and the contract signed, and construction was well under way, he discovered a loophole in the fine print: it permitted ornamental rather than essential changes. So, he made his alterations accordingly.
St Paul’s Cathedral is also Wren’s final resting place. Below is a photo of a copy of Wren’s death mask—the original is preserved at All Souls College in Oxford. A little morbid, perhaps, yet also a fascinating human attempt at transcending death.
Now who is Jenny Wren? What did P.L. Travers meant by saying that Wren was not related to Jenny? The reference is a pun woven by P.L. Travers—one I had completely missed, since English folklore and nursery rhymes were not part of my upbringing. For those who may also be unfamiliar: the wren, a tiny brown bird, was affectionately called “Jenny Wren” in English tradition. She appears in old songs and nursery rhymes, often paired with Robin Redbreast as husband and wife.
Children in P.L. Travers’s time would have instantly recognized “Jenny Wren” as shorthand for the little wren, and the playful wordplay would have delighted them. It signals to young readers that the world is whimsical, alive with hidden connections. The pun weaves together architecture (Wren), folklore (Jenny Wren), and the story’s imagery of birds and the mystical Bird Woman—perfect for a chapter set at St. Paul’s amid flocks of pigeons.
And for adult readers, there’s yet another layer: an echo of Dickens. Jenny Wren is also a character in Our Mutual Friend. That reference escaped me as well, but this Dickens novel has now joined my ever-expanding TBR list.
Poppin’s Court
Not far from St Paul’s Cathedral, just off Fleet Street, you will come across a narrow lane called Poppin’s Court. When P.L. Travers first came to London she worked as a free-lance journalist on a street near Fleet Street and she must have passed by Poppin’s Court on her way to St Paul’s Cathedral, and it is, as her friend Brian Sibley wrote, possible that this is how she came up with the idea for the name of her famous nanny.
Back in 2023, when my daughter and I visited Poppin’s Court, there was a Poppins Café, which may still be there. Sadly (for me), it had nothing to do with Mary Poppins. I would have loved to visit a Mary Poppins–inspired tea room based on the books.
Leicester Square Gardens
If you have time, be sure to stop by Leicester Square, where you’ll find several statues capturing iconic movie moments from different decades since the 1920s — and of course, one of them is Mary Poppins. Although the Mary Poppins statue in Leicester Square celebrates the film character rather than the one from the books, I couldn’t resist trying to ‘fly away’ on her umbrella.
Since this Mary Poppins statue was created many years after P.L. Travers’s death, we can only guess what she might have thought of it. What we do know is that she once wished for a statue of her character in London—though her dream location was Kensington Gardens. I will tell you more about that in a future post on this blog.
James Smith & Sons Umbrellas
If you want to get a parrot-headed umbrella like Mary Poppins’, you should definitely visit James Smith & Sons Umbrellas, a tiny shop founded back in 1830. I have no idea whether P.L. Travers knew about this shop or if she ever visited it. According to her own account, the inspiration for the parrot-headed umbrella came from a childhood memory of a servant’s umbrella in the Travers household in Australia (and maybe by something else, which I also plan to tell you about in a future post). But whether or not P. L. Travers ever visited this shop, I thoroughly enjoyed our own visit — dampened only by the scaffolding on the facade, which was under renovation.
Here is a picture of a parrot-headed umbrella standing proudly beside another famous fictional character. I was tempted to purchase both, but the price tag quickly discouraged me. But two years later I am still thinking about this parrot headed umbrella …
That’s it for now—thank you for reading! If this post brought you a little joy, just click the subscribe button in the bottom-right corner of your screen and join me for the next stop in my Mary Poppins adventures through London and beyond. You can also follow along on Facebook and Instagram for more glimpses into the magical world of Mary Poppins and P.L. Travers.
If you’re a devoted fan of Mary Poppins and P.L. Travers—like I am—or if you have a passion for literary travel, this blog post is for you. Through sharing my travel experiences, I hope to offer you some inspiration for visiting locations in London and its surroundings that are deeply connected to the enchanting world of Mary Poppins and her creator.
My Mary Poppins-Themed Trips to London and its Surroundings
In the summer of 2023, I finally fulfilled my long-held dream of visiting London—and the cherry on top was that my daughter decided to join me on the adventure. The trip was inspired by my love for P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins, and my daughter’s enthusiasm for Harry Potter. We also carved out time for some book shopping, exploring iconic historical landmarks, and visiting the Charles Dickens Museum. However, in this blog post, I’ll be focusing specifically on the Mary Poppins side of our journey.
So, let’s begin with a truly special address for any Mary Poppins fan.
50 Smith Street, Chelsea, London
P.L. Travers lived at 50 Smith Street, Chelsea, London with her adopted son, Camillus, from 1946 to 1962. It was here that she wrote Mary Poppins in the Park, the fourth book in the series. Today, the building proudly bears an English Heritage blue plaque in honour of her literary legacy. I used to come across photos of fans on its doorstep shared on social media, and I must admit, I always looked at them with a hint of envy. But now, it was my turn to see the place where she once lived and to experience history in a truly sensory way.
I remember fighting the urge to break into a run as we emerged from the Tube station and began walking down King’s Road. I glanced at the shop windows lining the sidewalks and the red double-decker buses on the street, their colours unusually vivid in the bright daylight, like freshly painted canvases. Even my daughter could sense my heightened emotional state and the spring in my step, and she teased me, ‘You do realise you’re not actually going to meet her in person?’ And I knew she was right—but this was the closest I could ever get to meeting her in the physical world.
In fact, I could hardly believe I was finally just steps away from something I had dreamed about for years—and had often doubted would ever come true. For one reason or another, it was never the right time; something always held me back from booking the trip. This may sound strange to experienced travellers, but I’m not much of a traveller myself—and Canada is a long way from London. So, this first trip to London was a big deal for me on many levels and as it turned out, the experience was truly transformative.
Now you can imagine my disappointment when we reached the corner of Smith Street and I saw a huge construction box blocking the entrance to 50 Smith Street.
The only positive thing, as suggested by a friend who saw the picture afterwards, was that there was a blown-up reproduction of the blue commemorative plaque on display, but that was probably just a friend’s way of trying to lift my spirits.
In a moment of madness (and ignoring my daughter’s rational arguments), I dialed the number displayed on the notice in the window of the construction box. It said that all visitors or anyone seeking access could call the number on the notice. Well, I was definitely a visitor wanting access. The person on the other end of the line clearly didn’t agree—they actually dared to hang up on me. Needless to say, I was offended, but as I gradually came to my senses, I realised not only was I acting a bit unhinged, but I also had a second chance just a few minutes’ walk down King’s Road: Number 29 Shawfield Street, the last residence of P.L. Travers. There really was no need to get so agitated.
29 Shawfield Street, Chelsea, London
P.L. Travers lived at number 29 Shawfield Street for the last thirty years of her life and it is in her the study on the second floor that she wrote Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane and Mary Poppins and the House Next Door, the last two books in the series.
As we turned the corner onto King’s Road and began walking toward Number 29 Shawfield Street, I felt a tinge of sadness that only deepened when I saw the front door, no longer pink as it had been when P.L. Travers lived there. We walked back and forth along the sidewalk, trying—but not quite succeeding—to be circumspect. After all, how circumspect can you really be when snapping selfies in front of someone’s front door?
It was a weekday, and I had convinced myself that the residents of Number 29 were probably at work. But then, a postman happened to walk by and rang the doorbell—and suddenly, the door opened. Feeling a bit embarrassed, we crossed to the other side of the street and sat on the edge of the sidewalk, while I continued to stare intently at the front door.
How I envied all those who had visited her here and, even if only briefly, had been granted a glimpse into her personal world. Below are two personal accounts from people who visited her home and the lasting impression it made on them.
“She lives in a small Georgian house in Chelsea. Her sitting room, where she received me, is light, airy and sparsely furnished. She sits on the corner of a long sofa the rest of which is covered with stacks of books, letters, various publications. On the creamy wall hang a Paul Klee, portraits of great grandmothers and aunts, a drawing of P.L. Travers by AE (George Russell), a Tree of Life by one of her students … The mantle piece is covered with photographs of family and friends, including many children.”
Looking Back, by Shusha Guppy
“P.L. Travers lives in a quiet, small period house in the Chelsea section of London, and everything in her home contributes to a visitor sensing the emptiness of plenitude and the plentitude of emptiness – exemplified in, her upstairs study, by several beautiful Japanese scroll and screen paintings, mostly by Sengai: a willow almost breaking in the wind; six persimmons; a cock crowing to the morning and a little hen bird nearby; the depiction of the syllable mu (literally meaning “not” or “without” and referring to a famous Zen koan and the extraordinary “Ten Oxherding Pictures” (attributed to the twelfth- century Chinese Zen master Kaku-an Shi-en).
Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, by Jonathan Cott
I tried to picture her stepping out of the front door, then slowly descending the three steps. I imagine her gaze fixed on the pavement as she walks down the street, her mind clearly elsewhere. Then she stops. Something has caught her eye. It must be the small star embedded in the sidewalk. She smiles. She loved pointing it out to friends who came to visit, inviting them to find it too—as if it were a secret only she could truly see.
How many people before me had walked that same stretch of pavement, searching for the star? And how many had actually found it? Not being able to see it myself was somewhat of a letdown. Could it be that she made it up? Or had time and countless footsteps worn it away?
Then I remembered reading a blog post by her friend, writer Brian Sibley in which he recounts his first encounter with her and, at the very end of his recollections, mentions the star on the pavement.
“Light was failing, but I found it, at last: just as Pamela had said – a star-shape, faintly but clearly marked in the surface of a paving stone. Doubtless it was some rouge imprint on the surface from the manufacturing of the cement paving-stone, but I was remembering the words of the old snake, the Hamadryad, on that night of the full moon when Mary Poppins took Jane and Michael to the zoo: ‘We are all made of the same stuff… The tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star – we are all one, all moving to the same end…’ ”
Chelsea Physic Garden, London
London’s oldest botanical garden, the Chelsea Physic Garden, is just around the corner from 29 Shawfield Street. It was founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries with the mission to grow medicinal plants for study and healing. Located in London, the garden played a key role in botanical research, plant exchange, and the advancement of medical science. Chelsea Physic Garden was open to the public in 1987 with the aim to increase public awareness and support for its historical and scientific significance.
I don’t know for sure if P.L. Travers ever visited the garden, she was 88 years old at the time, but it is possible. What I do know is that in her eighties she was very interested in the medicinal and magical properties of plants, probably motivated by a desire to find a cure, or at least some relief from her digestive problems. Her granddaughter Kitty, recalling childhood memories in an interview for the BBC, said her grandmother was always drinking strange teas and concoctions. These were probably the infusions she made from the herbs she cultivated on her balcony at 29 Shawfield Street.
In an interview she gave to South East at Six, a local BBC teatime news bulletin for viewers in London and the South East, promoting her book Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, we see P.L. Travers at the end of the video standing on her balcony, gathering herbs into a small wicker basket, a wooden birdhouse behind her. The balcony has a quiet, romantic storybook charm befitting of a writer steeped in fairy tales and mythology.
While the herbs aren’t central characters in the plot of Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, they do take on a magical, symbolic role during the Midsummer’s Eve adventure of the Banks children. The book also includes at its end a list of herbs with both common and Latin names that are mentioned in the story—a tangible nod to P.L. Travers’s knowledge of plants.
Occasionally, she also gave herbs as a gift to friends who came to visit her at her home.
“At the time I visited P.L. Travers in July 1979, I was feeling perplexed and confused about several things in my life, whose murkiness contrasted sharply with the clarity of the pictures in her study. (…) She also took me to her garden in the back, where she was growing more than twenty varieties of herbs, many of which appear in her recent Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane. (“Taste all of them,” she suggested, “they will do you good.”) Then, as a friendly gesture, she cut off some rosemary sprigs and gave them to me (“This will last forever and bring you good luck. It means “To Remember”)
Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, by Jonathan Cott
This is all for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this post and that you’ll return to read more about Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, and my adventures as I continue to explore their world. In the next blog post, I’ll be continuing the story of my Mary Poppins-themed trips to London and its surroundings, so stay tuned! And do let me know if you go on a Mary Poppins adventure of your own—or if you enjoy literary trips in general.
This blog post is going to be slightly more personal than usual as I want to share with you one of the many Mary Poppins effects in my personal life. These, for me magical, effects are incontestably transformative and have greatly enriched my inner life and personal happiness. That said, I am not suggesting that all personal challenges have vanished, but my ability to sustain and show resilience comes directly from these various effects.
First and foremost, reconnecting with my childhood reading of “Mary Poppins” reminded me of my deep love for magic and fairy tales. It also made me realize that my daily life had, sadly, become quite dull and ordinary. It’s not that I wasn’t surrounded by people and events—my life was filled with all the things that keep us busy and distracted. Of course, my family is a great source of love and support, and I am forever grateful to them, but there was an emptiness within me that couldn’t be filled by anyone, no matter how loving they were. It just dawned on me (and perhaps this realization had been building up inside of me for some time) that I felt constrained. Faced with this moment of recognition I had to acknowledge the need for more joy and wonder in my life.
But where to find them?
I decided to go search for them in the places where I had found them as a child. The day had come when I was finally old enough to start reading fairy tales again, to paraphrase a quote by C.S. Lewis. I felt goosebumps when I first read this quote by C.S. Lewis because the truth of his words resonated so deeply with my own experience.
Then, organically, one thing led to another, and I found myself collecting old books of fairy tales and fantastical adventures, something that I would never have thought I would be doing a few years ago, as it was so remote from the spheres in which I operated.
The moments I spend reading fairy tales and fantasy novels, or treasure hunting for old books, are pure bliss—a breath of fresh air in my daily life. It’s not just an escape from the ordinary; these activities also allow me to see the world in a new light. Looking at my bookshelves fills me not only with joy but with a sense of groundedness—a feeling of coming home. And I owe it all to P.L. Travers and her Mary Poppins.
Here, I’m sharing some pictures of the books in my modest collection, which I hope will expand over time.
The Brown Fairy Book by Andrew Lang. Illustration below is by H.J. Ford.
Below is a picture of the cover of Princes and Princesses by Andrew Lang.
Illustration below by H.J. Ford.
Below is the cover of Myths & Legends of Japan by F. Hadland Davis.
Illustration below by Evelyn Paul.
While reading interviews given by P.L. Travers, I discovered that our childhood readings intersected, despite our cultural and generational differences. We both read Beatrix Potter, the Brothers Grimm, and Andersen’s fairy tales, to name a few, only I read them translated in Bulgarian. This realization brought back memories of the fairy tales from my own childhood, with their beautiful illustrations, and I felt a deep grief for having left behind the most cherished treasure of all—my books.
My initial response to counter this grief was to dismiss it as childish. I told myself I had to accept certain losses in life. On a practical level, I also thought it unrealistic to expect I could find copies of these books now that I live so far from my birthplace. But was I being childish? Was this a loss that needed to be accepted, or was it the kind of loss that could be retrieved? P.L. Travers herself pondered the theme of loss often, and in her later years, she would say that all that is lost is somewhere.
I decided to give it a try, and with the help of the internet, I’m happy to report that, after a couple of years, I was able to reconstruct most of my childhood fairy tale book collection. I successfully found old copies of the editions I had as a child, as well as some new reprints of those same editions.
These were the books my mother read to me at bedtime and the ones I learned to read with, before I got acquainted with Mary Poppins.
Below are pictures of the illustrations in my copy of Sleeping Beauty. The illustrator is Italian artist Gianni Benvenuti. This was P.L. Travers’s favourite fairy tale. She even wrote her own retelling of it and I wrote two blog posts about it back in 2017; you can read one of them here, and if you’re interested, the other is easily found on the website of this blog.
Cinderella was my personal favourite fairy tale as a child, followed closely by Snow White, mostly because Snow White had dark hair like mine. The illustrations below are also by Benvenuti.
The illustrations of Snow White below are by Sandro Nardini.
And these are my two books of Andersen’s fairy tales. One is quite tattered, and the illustrations aren’t as beautiful as in the other, but I still enjoyed the stories. P.L. Travers loved Andersen’s fairy tales as a child, but as an adult, she had a different view. She believed Andersen undermined the vitality of his stories through his constant appeal for pity. It’s an interesting perspective, but one I don’t share.
The illustrations above are by Lyuben Zidarov. And the illustrations below are by Libico Maraja.
Here is now Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. I must have been around three years old when my mother read Beatrix Potter’s stories to me, and I remember the illustrations captivated me with such magnetic force. I wish I had P.L. Travers’s lyrical talent to describe the experience. It’s hard to put emotional states and impressions into words, but it truly felt as if I was part of the picture. It’s a strange feeling to remember the state yet not be able to recreate the experience. I still enjoy the illustrations, but our perceptions do grow duller as we age.
P.L. Travers adored Beatrix Potter and wrote a review of The Tale of Beatrix Potter by Margaret Lane. I wrote a blog post about it some time ago, you can read it here.
This is all for now. I’ll share more of my childhood book collection in a future post. In the meantime, take care, and I hope you’ll return to read more about Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, and my adventures as I continue to explore their world.
When I first read Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back (which were printed in one volume) as a child, I was not able to enjoy the original illustrations by Mary Shepard, as they were not included in the Bulgarian translation published in 1980. Instead, they were replaced by illustrations by Lyuben Dimanov.
I don’t think I liked Dimanov’s illustrations as a child because I have no memory of them, and I do remember a lot of the illustrations from my childhood books. All I remember is that the book was very thick, and it felt like proof that I was really good at reading. It was only a couple of years ago when I retrieved an old copy of my childhood edition of Mary Poppins that I realized the original illustrations were not in it.
Now that I am acquainted with the original illustrations, I find it difficult to enjoy Dimanov’s interpretations of the characters. For one, I find the figures a bit too angular, and their proportions too exaggerated. Moreover, in my opinion, he took his artistic liberties to the extreme. In fact, one has to wonder if he even read the stories, or how he could portray Mary Poppins with long, curly, flowing hair like a lion’s mane.
I’m certain P.L. Travers would have been upset if she had seen these illustrations—or maybe she did. I wish I could show them to her and ask her opinion. What we do know is that she was very particular about how Mary Poppins was depicted and insisted on her being represented exactly as she had imagined her.
In fact, P.L. Travers was so particular about the character, and Mary Shepard was such an inexperienced artist at the start of the project, that the emergence of Mary Poppins in visual form was not without its growing pains.
P.L. Travers wanted Mary Poppins to be plain, yet graceful, and to help the young visual artist grasp her vision of the character, they took many walks in the park to observe nannies pushing prams. Yet despite Shepard’s heartfelt efforts, P.L. Travers was not satisfied with the sketches and it wasn’t until she found a wooden doll with bright black hair, bright blue eyes, and a turned-up nose, and showed it to Shepard, that Mary Poppins finally took shape.
The working relationship between P.L. Travers and Mary Shepard spanned over 50 years, during which Shepard illustrated all the Mary Poppins books, including the Latin translation of Mary Poppins, a children’s cookbook, an alphabet book, and a coloring book published in 1969. I had been searching online for this coloring book for a long time, and then, one day, I was fortunate enough to find an unused copy on Facebook Marketplace of all places.
Oh, the joy of finding it and coloring the illustrations! Of course, I kept the original coloring book pristine and worked on photocopied pages, in case anyone is curious. I want to keep it as a collectible, but I also love the idea of having the chance to color the illustrations again whenever the mood strikes. The time I spent coloring reminded me of how much I loved it as a child. It also reminded me of my struggles of not crossing over the lines—though, as it turns out, I still struggle with that! But perfection isn’t the point. The point is enjoyment and playfulness at any age!
While coloring the pictures, I suddenly noticed something interesting in one of the illustrations that struck me as quite indicative of the nature of the relationship between Mary Shepard and P.L. Travers. Reportedly their relationship was a difficult one, P.L. Travers being portrayed as domineering and Mary Shepard as an underestimated, self-effacing artist. I believe that a glimpse of their relationship dynamic is reflected in one of the illustrations in the story “Balloons and Balloons”. This story first appears in the second book Mary Poppins Comes Back first published in 1935. Below is a picture of the illustration from the book.
The picture shows several of the Mary Poppins characters holding balloons with their names on them, floating through the air, with Mary Poppins as the central figure holding the largest balloon. But if you look up closely you will notice the two intruders in this picture. In the bottom left corner, you can see P.L. Travers and Mary Shepard joining the party. According to P.L. Travers, as she once told an interviewer, it was Mary Shepard’s idea to include them both in the illustration. (Personally, I think this was a genius idea.)
Notice how, in this picture, the two women are facing each other. Mary Shepard’s figure is slightly smaller, and her body curves in a way that seems to mold to the shape of P.L. Travers’ figure. Now, look at the picture below from the 1969 coloring book, keeping in mind that at the time, Shepard was bitter about not receiving any money from Disney for the movie adaptation of the character.
The figures are notably different in size and body language. P.L. Travers is larger and holds a bigger balloon. Her body flows gracefully through the air, with the string of her balloon twirling as she holds it effortlessly, without any strain. On the other hand, Mary Shepard, much smaller, is holding onto a short, tight string and appears tense, as if hanging on for dear life. Not only that, but she has her back turned to P.L. Travers.
I wonder if P.L. Travers noticed these changes in their positioning in the illustration, or if this detail completely escaped her, or if she would have even cared about it. I haven’t had the chance to delve deeper into their relationship, so I’m relying on what others have written about the subject and while I’m aware that I’m speculating on the comparative interpretation of these two illustrations, it was, nevertheless, a fun insight to gain from my interaction with A Mary Poppins Story for Coloring.
As for P.L. Travers’s view that ‘what counts most is the text, not the picture,’ I both agree and disagree with her. It all depends on the angle from which you look at the question. Of course, there would be no picture of Mary Poppins without the story, but for children, the illustrations are almost as important as the text.
Perhaps it’s because P.L. Travers never intended the books to be read solely by children that she prioritized the text. Or, maybe it was because she was human and fallible, and possessive of Mary Poppins. After all, she once told an interviewer that a fictional character is like a child to an author. One thing is certain: despite their differences, both P.L. Travers and Mary Shepard must have both gained something positive from their collaboration. Otherwise, why continue for fifty years?
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and that you’ll subscribe to my blog, so you don’t miss the next installment. While I can’t commit to a regular posting schedule, one thing I can promise is that I’ll continue writing about all things Mary Poppins and P.L. Travers.
I am thrilled to share with you some biographical facts hidden in P.L. Travers’s book ‘I Go by Sea, I Go by Land’. I first read this fictionalized account of her evacuation from the UK to the United States during WWII in 2018.
Briefly, for those who are unfamiliar with the book, it is written in the form of diary entries from 11-year-old Sabrina who recounts her and her brothers’ evacuation to the United States during the Second World War. Sabrina and her brother are accompanied on their journey by Pel, a family friend who is a writer and the mother of a baby named Romulus. As revealed by Valerie Lawson in her biography of P.L. Travers, ‘Mary Poppins She Wrote’ Pel stands for P.L. and Romulus for P.L. Travers’s adopted son Camilus.
My second reading of ‘I Go by Sea, I Go by Land’ proved more fruitful than my first one. (This tends to happen when revisiting books.) At the very beginning of the book P.L. Travers writes that ‘the experiences recorded in the book are authentic’ and as the story is ‘a personal record (…) certain names have necessarily been altered.’ Taking P.L. Travers’s statement to the letter, I approached the story with the mindset of a detective, meticulously following every clue and detail. What follows is what I discovered about P.L. Travers’s visit to Montreal in the autumn of 1940.
Montreal is where my parents and I settled after leaving Bulgaria in the early 1990s, and although I no longer live in the city, it is where I work during the week and where I often spend time with friends. You can imagine the excitement I felt when I connected the dots between the hints in the book about the locations P.L. Travers visited and the people she encountered during her stay.
During her visit to Montreal, P.L. Travers stayed at the Windsor Hotel, where other famous authors, such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, had sojourned before her, although the story doesn’t say if she was aware of it. This is how she described the lobby of the hotel in ‘I Go by Sea, I Go by Land’ in the words of Sabrina who writes in her diary that the Hotel ‘is just like a Cathedral inside’.
Below is a picture of the lobby of the Windsor Hotel in 1878 taken by William Notmam and you can see why Sabrina (P.L. Travers) compares it to a Cathedral.
The Windsor Hotel was one of Canada’s most impressive buildings of the Second Empire style and was considered the best hotel in all the Dominion. It was a magnificent nine-story structure of sandstone and granite which span along the entire block of René-Lévesque (then Dorchester) Boulevard and Cypress Street, between Stanley and Peel (then Windsor) streets. To its guests it offered “palatial splendor with its gold-embossed lobby, six restaurants, two ballrooms, concert hall and 382 luxurious guest-rooms”.
Unfortunately, a fire devastated the hotel in 1957 and “the damages caused to the South wing were so great that the structure had to be demolished on August 12, 1959. All that remained was its 1908 North Annex – this portion of the former hotel still stands today.”
Below is a picture I took of it for this blog post.
Now, let’s turn to another revealing entry in Sabrina’s diary. She writes about how, upon their arrival at the hotel, they are greeted by the Red Cross. When Pel signs her name, a Red Cross representative named Letty recognizes her, suggesting that Pel is a famous author, and invites her to lunch at her home. Then the reader learns that Letty has four children, all boys and that her husband is ‘a famous doctor’ called Kent.
When Dr. Kent comes home, he offers the guests “cocktails of lemonade and coco-cola” and then takes Pel and the children for a drive to show them the river (Saint Lawrence River). At the end of the drive, at Pel’s request, he drops them off at the Cathedral. This is what Sabrina writes in her diary: ‘So she and James and I went in and there was water in two enormous sea-shells, very beautiful and fluted.’
The Cathedral in question is Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, which stands diagonally opposite form the Windsor building.
At its entrance stand two seashells filled with holy water. Below are the pictures I took for this blog:
Who was Dr. Kent?
Well, in my opinion, he could only have been Dr. Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon who revolutionized brain treatment. He became famous for his epilepsy operation, which came to be known as the “Montreal Procedure”.
I find his physical description in the book quite perceptive; it is exactly the impression Dr. Penfield gave me when I watched a documentary about him.
“He has the kind of face that makes you want to keep on looking at him. Very kind and twinkly and it seems to say to you ‘There now. Everything is all right. Don’t worry.’”
Dr. Penfield was born in 1891 in a middle-class family in Wisconsin, United States. He studied at Princeton and Oxford. He initially sought to establish his career in the United States, but it was not easy for a junior surgeon in an emerging medical field. At that time Montreal was a city with an internationally famous medical community but with no full-time brain surgeon. The only full-time brain surgeon in Canada had set up in Toronto.
The Royal Victoria Hospital went shopping for a brain surgeon in New York and in 1928 Dr. Penfield came to Montreal. In 1934, with the combined help of the Rockefeller Foundation, the City of Montreal and the Quebec government, he founded the Montreal Neurological Institute which is still in existence today.
Dr. Penfield had four children, two boys and two girls, who in 1940 were aged 22, 21, 14 and 13. In my opinion, P.L. Travers tried to keep Dr. Penfield’s identity anonymous by changing the genders of two of his children in the story.
But, there is another clue in “I Go by Sea, I Go by Land” that points in the direction of Dr. Penfield. During WWII his wife, Helen Kermott Penfield, was deeply engaged with a volunteer group helping émigrés from war-stricken Europe. She had joined the circle of the bourgeois Christian women of the United Church on February 20, 1940. In affiliation with St. James Church this group started a refugee committee which met on regular basis and Mrs. Penfield became very active from 1940 until 1943. On a pragmatic level she liaised with the Canadian Red Cross and arranged for collections of clothes and groceries. It seems more than likely that Letty was, in fact, Mrs. Penfield.
When considered together, these elements make a compelling case for a meeting between P.L. Travers and Dr. Penfield. Unfortunately, Dr. Penfield’s children have all passed away, so I couldn’t validate my theory. However, the coincidences are too significant to dismiss.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blogpost as much as I enjoyed writing it, and that you will come back to read more about P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins.
I am thrilled to tell you all about my recent conversation with renowned author Jane Yolen who had the opportunity to meet with P.L. Travers on two occasions, the first of which happened back in 1966. But first, let me share a bit about Yolen’s literary work.
Yolen has written over 400 books for children and adults and is the recipient of many literary awards among which are the Caldecott Medal, two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, the World Fantasy Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Grand Master Award.
She, like P.L. Travers, is a poet with a deep love for fairy tales and has penned several unique retellings and re-imaginings of these timeless stories, infusing them with her own creative touch. I’ll delve deeper into her retelling of Sleeping Beauty and her novel Curse of the Thirteenth Fey in a future blog post. As you may know, Sleeping Beauty was P.L. Travers’s favorite fairy tale, which she explored and analysed (pondered) in her 1975 book, About Sleeping Beauty.
Yolen first met P.L. Travers in 1966 on the famous night when Look Magazine was covering an open house evening with her and a few students from Smith College. At the time P.L. Travers was a writer-in-residence at Smith College and, according to Valerie Lawson, she was not having a good time there.
An article titled “A Visit with the Real Mary Poppins” by Joseph Roddy, was published in Look Magazine on December 13, 1966. A hint of P.L. Travers’s difficulty to connect with the students echoes in the lines of Roddy’s article: ‘P.L. – she would prefer being Anon but will endure the initials – gets the ones who memorized Blake, pondered Camus, are awash in The Hobbit and know every move Mary Poppins made.’ He goes on to write: ‘The talk leaps across centuries every night P.L. has open house in a dormitory suite brightened only by handsome girls and snappy lines.’
According to Yolen’s recollections, there were about fifteen women present, along with the journalist and the photographer from Look Magazine. Yolen was a sort of VIP guest that evening. She, her husband, and their four-month-old baby were accompanying P.L. Travers’s goddaughter, who had a personal invitation to the event.
Yolen’s first impression of P.L. Travers was that she behaved much like the Mary Poppins from the books—whom Yolen had read and loved as a child.
Today, people who have not read the books think of Mary Poppins as the pleasant and charming character from the movies. Then, if they read the books, they are taken aback by the harsher version of the original character. I notice this contrast frequently on social media and I think that it is unfortunate because the expectations set by the movies prevent the readers from appreciating the depths and complexities of the original character.
Mary Poppins is more than just a caregiver in the stories; she acts as a mediator between worlds, initiating the Banks children to the mysteries of life. This dual role creates a fascinating split-personality dynamic that captivates children and adds to the mystery of Mary Poppins’s magic. As a child I never questioned why Mary Poppins could be strict and abrupt with the Banks children; I instinctively understood that it was all part of a playful facade. Beneath it all, she was a good fairy, and I knew that the Banks children felt the same way.
As an adult rereading the Mary Poppins stories and learning about P.L. Travers’s life and spiritual beliefs, I realize that Mary Poppins could be no other way in our world. While others may have different interpretations of the character, the true magic of Mary Poppins lies precisely in her paradoxical nature. The same is true for P.L. Travers herself.
According to Yolen’s recollections of that memorable night, both aspects of P.L. Travers’s character came to the forefront. The anecdotes that follow are not reported in Roddy’s article.
A young student, who had the audacity to begin a question by admitting she hadn’t read the books but had only seen the film, was administered a spoon full of vinegar by P.L. Travers: ‘Then Dear, you KNOW NOTHING, and I suggest you do not say another word.’ ‘It felt almost like she had cursed the poor girl,’ said Yolen, ‘she was reduced to stunned silence’.
Admittedly, there might have been a gentler way to handle the situation, but the fact is that, two years earlier, the Disney film had left a deep wound in P.L. Travers’ psyche—one that had not yet begun to heal (no matter how much money she got out of it, people keep bringing up this argument all the time…) The young student was likely unaware of all this, but who attends a writer’s event without having read their work and then feels entitled to express opinions? Isn’t that rather rude as well?
As for the movie, Yolen recalls watching it with her husband in London and enjoying the music. She did however find Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent rather strange, and she thought that the Mary Poppins of her childhood would never sing, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” She was right.
Mary Poppins never explains or sugarcoats anything. If medicine is required, it is administered with a stern demeanor that accepts no opposition, as the Banks children discover in the very first story “East Wind”. It is only after they swallow the medicine that they realize that it has magically transformed into their favorite flavor. For Jane it is lime-juice cordial, for Mickael it is strawberry ice and for the twins John and Barbara it is milk. This is the way of the real Mary Poppins.
Another amusing incident during the screening of the film by Yolen and her husband – and one that I’m sure P.L. Travers would have enjoyed hearing about – occurred when Yolen’s husband, a passionate bird watcher, suddenly stood up and exclaimed loudly during the scene where Julie Andrews is singing with the chirping audio-animatronic bird on her finger, ‘But this isn’t a British robin; it’s an American robin!’ The audience responded with laughter and approval.
Now let’s go back to the open house evening of 1966. After casting her chilling spell on the poor girl who knew nothing about Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers shape-shifted into a protective, motherly figure toward Yolen and her 4-month-old baby. When the baby began to cry, Yolen, not wanting to disturb the event, considered leaving, but P.L. Travers wouldn’t hear of it. She directed Yolen to her bedroom, where she could use the rocking chair and feed her daughter in peace. “She didn’t ask,” Yolen recalled, “she told,” and that, in fact, felt comforting. “It felt like I was in safe hands,” just as the Banks children felt safe in the care of Mary Poppins.
Years later, Yolen participated in a fundraising event for Parabola, a magazine co-founded by Ellen Dooling Draper and P.L. Travers. The event took place in New York, and Joseph Campbell was also in attendance. As a young writer and a collaborator of the magazine, Yolen was invited to the event. Unfortunately, her opportunities to engage with P.L. Travers were limited to brief exchanges of greetings, as P.L. Travers was busy hosting and entertaining the magazine’s patrons, revealing yet another side of her personality, the practical, business side!
Yolen recalls how Joseph Campbell leaped onto a chair and captivated the audience for more than half an hour with stories from around the world on the theme of giving. As I listened to Yolen’s vivid recounting, (she really is a great storyteller) I couldn’t help but yearn to travel back in time and experience the event firsthand. I wish I could have witnessed P.L. Travers’s reaction to Campbell’s performance. She, for some unknown reason, disliked him. It may have been motivated by feelings of rivalry; she was human, after all. Campbell was a scholar and a recognized expert in mythology, while she was self-taught, and although equally knowledgeable about myths and fairy tales, was not as popular as him. There may have been other reasons, but for now, they remain unknown.
It is fascinating to me how the paths of these two women writers intersected and how they were connected by their shared interests in fairy tales and love of poetry. One of Yolen’s poems, “Land of Miracles,” would certainly have been enjoyed by P.L. Travers, both for its origins and its message.
The poem was inspired by a serendipitous incident during a walk in a cemetery in Ireland. Yolen, who enjoys strolling in cemeteries, remembers how, on one such walk, she stumbled and steadied herself by leaning on a gravestone. She felt a sudden, electrifying sense of otherworldlines and then she realized with astonishment that the gravestone she had leaned on was that of the great magician and poet W.B. Yeats. This unexpected encounter inspired Yolen to write:
‘Yes, poetry matters. Words matter. Great buildings tumble. But story remains.’
I am deeply grateful for Jane Yolen’s generosity and for taking the time to reminisce about P.L.Travers, and I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Recently, I revisited a transcript of a conversation between P.L. Travers and Janet Graham that took place in P.L. Travers’s home on June 23, 1965. I like to do that occasionally. Although I love discovering new information about P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins, and all things related to them, rereading materials I’ve gathered over the years allows me to notice things I did not see the first time. Frequently, and to my enjoyment, the information I glean sends me into another tunnel in the rabbit hole in which I fell nine years ago, and I hope you enjoy being taken along on this exploratory journey.
The title of the interview is “A Conversation About Sorrow,” and it is one of my favorite P.L. Travers interviews. All her interviews are interesting and provide much food for thought, but I notice that their quality depended a lot on the chemistry between her and the interviewer. Luckily for us readers, when she liked the journalist, she was more talkative, and I get the impression from this conversation that she did like Janet Graham.
Today, I want to tell you about “The Three Little Foxes” by Mary Tourtel, a book that P.L. Travers kept with her since she was 7 years old. On the flyleaf of her book someone wrote the name of Mary Poppins, but according to P.L. Travers, it was not she who wrote it.
In the transcript “A Conversation About Sorrow” there is a handwritten note in the margin: “start of Mary Poppins”. It is right next to the passage in the interview where P.L. Travers told Janet Graham that her sister had mentioned that, as a child, P.L Travers told her siblings stories about Mary Poppins. However, P.L. Travers didn’t believe her sister to be right. She said, “I think she is having very clever hindsight”.
We will never know who wrote the name of Mary Poppins on the flyleaf. It is possible that her son Camillus wrote it when he was a young boy. He must have seen the book in his mother’s library and, knowing that she wrote the Mary Poppins stories, could have written it himself. I know I used to scribble things in books as a child, but of course, all this is just a speculation on my part.
P.L. Travers loved the story of “The Three Little Foxes”. She said, “It was a lovely story. Three Foxes called Ringo, Bingo and Lubilee – What beautiful names, Ringo Bingo and Lubilee. They were great family names; my mother was always calling us those names. She had the kind of mind quotations stuck in.”
And that is all she said about the story in the interview. What was it about? What did the little foxes do? Why did she like it so much to keep it with her all this time? Was it because of her fond memories of her mother, or was it something else?
I wanted to find out, and luckily, I managed to find an old (and affordable) copy on the Internet. It did not have ‘Mary Poppins’ written on its flyleaf, (I secretly wished it did!), but at least I now know the story and can speculate about why she might have liked it. I wonder who has her copy of the book now?
“The Three Little Foxes” tells the story of three brothers who decide to leave their cozy home and seek adventure in the world. In fact, it is the two oldest brothers, Ringo and Bingo, who are bored and need a change of scenery. Meanwhile Lubilee, the youngest brother, is quite content at home and doesn’t really have time for boredom. He is busy in the kitchen cooking and taking care of his brothers. But when the older brothers decide to leave their home, he must follow them, albeit unwillingly.
The three brothers meet a frog who tells them that if they are in search of adventure, maybe they could rescue the Fox Princess, who is kept hostage by the Old Bear Ogre. The three little foxes must go see the Queen of the Rabbits, who knows of a secret entrance to the grounds of the Bear Ogre’s castle. The Queen agrees to help them and orders one of her guards to lead the brothers through a secret passage leading to the garden where the Fox Princess likes to spend time.
When the three brothers arrive at the entrance of the passage, which turns out to be a long and winding tunnel, it is only Lubilee who musters enough courage to follow the guard. Scared Ringo and Bingo remain behind.
Lubilee succeeds in finding the garden and meets with the Fox Princess who, at that precise moment, happens to be strolling there. He tells the princess that he and his brothers have come to save her, but she warns him that the task is going to be difficult. The Ogre keeps her locked up in a lonely tower.
It was at this point in the narrative that I failed to follow the logic of the story. It is unclear (and frankly does not make much sense) why the Princess does not run off with Lubilee towards the secret tunnel and out of the garden right there and then. Instead, she tells Lubilee where the Ogre hides the key to her tower. It is in a box he uses as a footstool while sitting on his chair.
Lubilee goes back to his brothers, tells them all about the Princess and the key, and they come up with a plan on how to gain entrance into the Ogre Castle. They present themselves as acrobats who want to perform before the Bear Ogre.
During their performance, which consists of the two older brothers standing on their heads while Lubilee spins plates on sticks, the Bear Ogre sits comfortably in his chair with his feet on the footstool. However, their chance comes when Bear Ogre invites them to stay over for dinner and a little dance.
After dinner, the Bear Ogre wants to show his abilities too and he begins to dance the Keel Row. He is so taken by his dancing that he does not notice little Lubilee taking the key from the box in the footstool.
As soon as the little foxes find themselves outside of the castle, Ringo and Bingo start quarrelling over who should marry the Princess. In the meantime, Lubilee runs towards the tower and frees the Princess.
The Fox King was so glad that he called his Queen, gathered his court together and made Lubilee a Prince on the spot. Lubilee and the Princess become husband and wife.
When Ringo and Bingo finally find their way to the Fox King’s City, they begin to tell everyone who wants to hear that they were the ones who saved the Princess, and that Prince Lubilee is an impostor. Their slander lands them in a dungeon, but then good-hearted Lubilee frees them and appoints Ringo his Prime Minister, and Bingo the Commander-in-Chief of his Army. This decision seems very unwise to me…and could potentially propel Lubilee on another hero’s journey. Maybe I will try my hand at writing a sequel…but who will illustrate it?
P.L. Travers wrote an essay titled “The Youngest Brother”, it was first published in ‘Parabola’ on the theme of the Trickster in 1979 and then in “What the Bee Knows” in 1989. She reflects on the character of the youngest brother in fairy tales, who is often depicted as a simpleton, meaning, as she tells us, innocent and blessed. He is not yet burdened with knowledge and pride. He eagerly offers and accepts help from others, no matter how strange they may appear.
She goes on to explain the usual sequence in these types of stories, which “The Three Little Foxes” follows closely.
The stories always begin with a quest, something that only the three brothers can undertake. However, the usual mistake of the two older brothers is that they believe success in their quest depends solely on themselves. Consequently, they often find themselves imprisoned at the beginning of the story, unable to continue their quest.
In these stories, P.L. Travers tells us, there is also an imprisoned princess who is the youngest brother’s complementary figure. Then, the youngest brother is wronged by the older brothers who are envious and greedy, just like Ringo and Bingo in the story, and things can become quite dangerous; all can be lost.
In the end, the youngest brother forgives his brothers’ sins. P.L. Travers links this pattern of forgiveness to Plato’s myth of the Cave: “... where those who have risen to the light go down again to rescue others who still live with the shadows.”
The third and youngest brother in fairy tales is always in service of something else than himself and does not think he knows it all like his older brothers, who consider themselves to be men of the world who know their way about it.
Knowing tells us P.L. Travers is achieved through unknowing. Learning through experience, the man becomes a child – pure at heart.
She also links the progress of the youngest brother through his quest to Gurdjieff’s Law of Seven and the concept of repairing the past in the present. Although original and interesting, this calls for a separate blog post.
I hope you enjoyed this post and will come back again to read some more about P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins.
As a devoted fan of P.L. Travers, you can only imagine my delight in having the opportunity to learn firsthand about a private conversation she had with bestselling fantasy author Gregory Maguire back in 1995, a year before her passing. I hope that reading this blog post will be as much of a treat for you as it was for me to write it.
As a young boy, Gregory Maguire loved the Disney adaptation of Mary Poppins, but he loved the books more. And I believe that this is the case for most of us who first encountered the magical nanny on the page. It was certainly my own experience, but then I never saw Disney’s Mary Poppins as a child growing up behind the Iron Curtain. My acquaintance with the cinematographic version of Mary Poppins came much later and at a time when my mind had acquired its critical abilities.
“The movie is sunny and as sweet as a spoonful of sugar. The books, though, show glimmers of a far more mysterious and even dangerous world. For thirty years before the nanny began to sing on the screen, she stalked the pages of these books with ferocity and power.” (Foreword by Gregory Maguire, Mary Poppins Collection published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
I couldn’t agree more!
At the time of his meeting with P.L. Travers, Gregory Maguire was at a turning point in his writing career as he was just about to publish his bestselling novel “Wicked”. He was living in London, and after discovering that the author of Mary Poppins also lived there, he sent her a note, and in return received an invitation for tea.
He showed up at Number 29, Shawfield Street, London on the appointed day and time with three of P.L. Travers’s books: one of the Mary Poppins books, “The Fox at the Manger” and “Aunt Sass”.
He found P.L. Travers “an old woman slumped in an upholstered chair set back from the window” in a “shadowy parlor that hadn’t been fluffed up recently”.
The meeting lasted for about an hour, but it was long enough for P.L. Travers to plant a seed for a story in her visitor’s fertile imagination. It was a comment she made about a fairy tale character, the youngest brother in the fairy tale “The Six Swans” by the Brothers Grimm. In this story the wicked stepmother turns her stepchildren into swans, and it is their sister who, in the end, breaks the spell by knitting shirts from aster flowers. Only she does not have enough time to finish the last shirt and the youngest brother is left with one swan wing instead of an arm.
P.L. Travers felt, and rightfully so, that there, at the end of one story, was the beginning of another.
Shortly after Gregory Maguire finished writing his book “A Wild Winter Swan” but before its publication in 2020, he came across in his hand-written journals from 1995 something about P.L. Travers having said to him, “There’ a story – the sixth brother. Give him something to do. The boy with a wing. You know the one I mean?”
As the swan boy had been a beloved figure in his psyche ever since reading Hans Christian Andersen’s beautiful retelling of the Grimms’ fairy tale at the age of ten or twelve, her remark had evidently stuck in his subconscious. But that’s where Gregory Maguire tells us, seeds to stories wait.
This is by far the most exciting interview I have had the opportunity to conduct so far, but before we dive into it, and with Mr. Maguire’s permission, I am reproducing a portion of his lecture “The World at Hand, The World Next Door” presented by the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books for the 32nd Annual Helen E. Stubbs Memorial Lecture in November of 2019. Here is his charming recollection of his meeting with P.L. Travers.
I was living in London. Because somehow, I came across her home mailing address—perhaps in the phone book—I’d written to the author of MARY POPPINS, Ms. P. L. Travers, to thank her for her great work. She’d replied in a shaky hand ordering me to come to tea Tuesday week. Perhaps she preferred to receive tribute in person, I thought. (…) It’s nearly time to go—Number 29 Shawfield Street, London. . . .
A Georgian [row] house with a broad single window, behind palings, a small house on the east side of the street, behind a shocking pink door . . . at street level. The doorbell sharp and hard. I thought she might have forgotten, might not be there. A young woman, maybe part Jamaican, came in jeans and answered the door.
P. L. Travers sat in a chair in the corner, angled so she could watch out the window. She looked up when we came in and said to me, “Who are you?” I introduced myself—and she seemed not to hear me, but when I said again, more slowly, “Gregory” she appended “Maguire.” “You invited me to come by, and so I have, for a very short time,” I said. Mostly, in her face, were eyes and smile; she smiled like a small child; she seemed happy at everything, and smiled as a way of conversing. I had heard she was a bitch, a tart and difficult woman, but only at the end of my visit did one small comment erupt.
What follows is a sort of dialogue I devised that day out of notes I scribbled down on the back of a checkbook immediately after I had left Ms. Travers’ home. By this I mean it is more scripted than it may have sounded as it occurred—one can’t help imposing logic on scribbled notes. But the exchanges are verbatim as I could recall them even if they didn’t come out as sequentially as I put them down. Only a few words have been changed, for clarity.
PLT: I’ve been in the hospital and the nursing home for two years. I just got back. I can move very little.
GM: Can you get out at all?
PLT: Up and down the street.
GM: To the end.
PLT: To the second lamp-post. My world has shrunk to the second lamppost. But when I was out the other day, looking down to watch my feet, I found a present—
GM: —?
PLT: A star. A star!—there in the pavement. I’d never seen it there before. There’s a story—the sixth brother. Give him something to do. The boy with a wing. You know the one I mean
GM: Yes (I thought I might but wasn’t certain).
PLT: At the end of the street is a pub called the World’s End.
GM: At the other end, on the King’s Road, is a café called the Picasso Café. I sat there and a storm came up, and a rainbow came over—just ten minutes ago.
PLT: That was for you, to show you that you’re welcome here.
GM: You live between the star and the rainbow.
PLT: Yes! . . . . this is my whole world. There used to be… acres and acres of lavender, and cows mooing.
GM: Where is Cherry Tree Lane?
PLT: What?
GM: Where in London is Cherry Tree Lane supposed to be?
PLT: I don’t know what you mean.
GM: The house that Mary Poppins lived in. Is it in Chelsea? In Kensington?..
PLT: Oh! Well, no. Well, it’s…. it’s…. (she waves her hand)… It’s between here and someplace else.
GM: Do you know, I grew up on Mary Poppins. When I was ten years old, I sat on our front porch and read the books and ate sour-apple hard candy. I never forget it.
PLT: Do you know, when I came home from hospital, I picked up the second Mary Poppins book, and I began to read it. And I didn’t know what was going to happen! I turned the pages—I found it delightful. …. I didn’t know what would come next.
GM: I’m not surprised. She’s a mystery.
PLT: I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her. . . .
GM: Will you sign a few books?
PLT: It is hard to do.
GM: Maybe three? This is MARY POPPINS AND THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR.
PLT: And this is something special for you. (She draws a star). William Butler Yeats told me only to sign my name, but this is for you.
GM: Do you remember this? (A privately printed copy of AUNT SASS, which Travers had once had done up as a Christmas present for close friends.)
PLT: ! (She opens it.) Look! Stars! Nine stars! Who put those there? But where’s myname?
GM: On the front. (She crosses out the printed name and signs her own name.) And this last. MARY POPPINS OPENS THE DOOR. It’s my favorite.
PLT: It’s not for children.
GM: It’s Mystery. Mystery is for children.
PLT: Yes, but also for adults.
GM: Yes. Of course.
PLT: (She signs it.) I found a picture of myself in the chapter called “Balloons and Balloons.” Me and Mary Poppins and Mary Shepherd.
GM: I’ll look for it when I go home. And I should go soon. I’m flying out tonight.
PLT: Where?
GM: Dublin tonight, and Boston tomorrow.
PLT: I was at Radcliffe once, teaching. And at Smith. I loved Radcliffe. I hated Smith.
GM: Why?
PLT: A man from an American magazine called Life came to every lecture, and all the Smith girls threw themselves at him.
GM: This has been an extraordinary afternoon for me. I will never forget it. Thank you. (I kiss her.) Goodbye.
PLT: Goodbye. Write about this.
GM: Pardon—?
PLT: Write about coming here to tea.
Cheryl shows me to the door. I leave PLT sitting in the corner of the room, all eyes and smile, in a blue cardigan, knees together, hands on her knees. The big square window is now dark with dusk.
Something intriguing about the conversation: “Here I divert from my journals to insert a memory that I didn’t write down at the time. Ms. Travers elected to address me as the man who came to read the meters, and kept telling me they were out back, through that door. She seemed entirely unfazed that the meter man would arrive carrying rare copies of her hardcover books and would be conversant in arcane details of her career and work. I’ve often wondered if she wasn’t having me on.”
Reading about the man who came to read the meters made me smile. She was, most probably “having him on”. Her life quest was all about finding the meaning of life and the questions she asked in her essays were “Who are you?” and “What is man a metaphor for?” It is possible then that she was probing her guest in the manner of her spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff, who used to shock and surprise his pupils with strange statements and behaviours in order to break down their habitual thought patterns and thus strip off their masks.
Now, onto my interview with Mr. Maguire and his delightful book “A Wild Winter Swan”.
LS: Is there is a possibility for a sequel of “A Wild Winter Swan”? In the ending Laura explains the swan boy’s arrival into her world in these words: “No, he has flown away from them once because he could not bear to be other than wholly human. Now he has to try the alternative. He really doesn’t have a choice. Do we.” But what if that alternative does not prove to be the solution either?
GM: I have not contemplated writing a sequel to “A Wild Winter Swan” —but I never say never with conviction. I had not contemplated writing a sequel to “Wicked”, and it was ten years before “Son of a Witch” came out. There have been five more books about my take on Oz after that one—so far.
Still, in regard to “A Wild Winter Swan”, I admit there is something both sad and satisfying in the loss of a character whom one has come to love—even one who is ultimately bewildering. Not unlike, come to think of it, a certain Mary Poppins herself. I tried to leave the reader with a sense of insecurity about how and even why this boy, Hans, had landed in Laura’s life.
LS: Yes, I did wonder about that too. Did Laura somehow summon him because she herself was in a liminal state of being; suspended between the dreamland of childhood and the demands of adolescence, all in the background of the dire circumstances of her personal life? Or was it the other way around. Why did the swan boy happen to Laura?
GM: Why does anything happen to anyone? Why did Peter Pan land on the nursery windowsill of the Darling family instead of the family next door named the Oblenskys, with their fat little cousin visiting from Moscow, the one who dangled the family turtle from a third-floor window and nearly decapitated it? It just happened. Wendy’s mother told stories, after all, and Peter wanted to hear the stories.
Hans might just have landed on Laura’s windowsill by chance. Things happen in stories. On the other hand, Laura had just read the Andersen tale to those first-grade students. Then she’d come home and helped rescue a worker about to fall off Laura’s own roof. The conditions of Hans’s arrival were established in her mind by the events of the day. Maybe they helped her recognize him when it happened—or maybe it was happening largely in her mind, a dream and hope of escape and of rescue from her increasingly dire situation. (Of course, no one else saw the visitor except the cat, and there is the matter of the bloody eels, the most proof that someone else is in the house with the Ciardi family. But maybe the cat did get the eel itself, and Laura was inventing what else must have happened in the terms of the story going on in her head.)
This makes a sequel hard to position in my imagination, for in order for there to be more to Hans, I would have to be more definite about how, and what, he actually is—and that he lives outside of the story Laura is busy telling herself in her own head. And I’m not sure of that myself.
The point is, while I think that Hans is real, and so does Laura, others might not be so sure.
LS: I believe Hans to be real too, but maybe other readers will interpret the story differently. P.L. Travers said that a book is only half the writer, the other half being the reader. I wonder if you intentionally made the parallel between Laura’s inner strength and that of Elise in Andersen’s story.
Elise must knit shirts from stinging-nettle without ever saying a single word and at the risk of perishing because of it. Laura does speak in the story, but she is mute about the existence of the swan boy, and she goes about his rescue in the most secretive way despite all the challenges that his presence creates in her already troublesome situation.
I found Laura to be just as self-contained, determined and resilient as Elise in Andersen’s fairy tale. And just like in Andersen’s fairy tale, by saving the swan boy, Laura saves herself. Did you start writing the story with the end in mind, or did the narrative unfold organically in this way?
GM: When I began to write the story, I wanted Laura to be clever imaginatively but not socially—perhaps a bit backward in school. I never know how stories are going to end when I start them—that means I am uncovering the story in an organic way, as I want readers to do, too. I didn’t realize until about 2/3 of the way through the story that as Laura didn’t have the capacity—as Elise in Andersen’s story didn’t, either—to do surgery upon the swan boy and convert his swan wing to an arm, there really was only one other choice: she had to return to him a second wing, and confer upon him agency to fly away. This is also what she has to do for herself, and so I intended that the act of rescue for Hans should be synonymous, or at any rate practice, for the act of rescuing herself.
LS: Why did Laura’s grandparents choose a boarding school in Montreal as an alternative to her education? I live on the south shore of Montreal and work in the city, so naturally, this caught my interest.
GM: There is one main reason for this. As I loved books like “A Wrinkle in Time”, “Mary Poppins”, “The Wizard of Oz” and the Narnia books—among many others—I noted even then that there is a consistency of literary genre in these beloved titles. I didn’t know the word “fantasy” until I was in high school, I mean not as applied to a type of story. I called them “magic books” —books about magic (though they seemed to do magic, too, in how they made me feel!)
But I had one favorite title from childhood that was not a literary fantasy. It was the novel by Louise Fitzhugh called “Harriet the Spy”. You’ve heard of it, and perhaps you’ve read it. Harriet is a sixth-grade girl who spies on her classmates, writes things down in her journal, and intends to become a writer when she grows up. She is wildly curious and, like all children, quite naive, but she is working at increasing her bank of experiences so she can understand the world better.
In writing “A Wild Winter Swan”, I wanted to pay homage to Harriet a little. I set the story in roughly the same patch of neighborhood where Harriet lives, on the Upper East Side of New York—and in very nearly the same couple of years. (“Harriet the Spy” came out in 1964, I think, and my story takes place in 1962.) I imagined Harriet and Laura passing one another on the pavement. I didn’t want Laura to be a writer per se, as that would be too imitative, and besides Laura’s capacity to “see” and experience Hans is predicated on her simplicity, perhaps her simple-mindedness—so working arduously with words the way Harriet does would contradict Laura’s open and believing nature. Her gullibility, perhaps.
Instead, I had Laura “think” stories—narrate her own experiences in her head as she would write them—if she were a writer. She is not shy of imagination and thoughtfulness, after all—or of imaginative sympathy—but she is not academically robust, either. This method allowed me to have Laura comment on her own experiences but only in her head. It’s another proof that she lives in her mind, and therefore another hint that the incidents with Hans may be self-generated. (You might say she is having a schizoidal break, unable to separate between reality and fantasy. I mean some might say that. I wouldn’t.)
In “Harriet the Spy”, the child’s beloved governess leaves the household about halfway through the novel to get married. She tells Harriet she is going to move with her beau to Montreal. To Harriet, Montreal seems as far away as the moon. “Mon-tre-ALLLL?” she wails when she hears the plan. My threat of sending Laura to Montreal was a quiet tip of the hat to Louise Fitzhugh.
I like Montreal, though. My big sister, who was a little like Laura in 1962, grew up and married a Canadian man and spent all her adult life in Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto, and is now retired as a grandmother in Ontario. So, growing up in Albany NY, Montreal was to me a place of warmth and attraction, and I liked, and like, visiting.
LS: In your interview by Kristen McDermott, you say that “Magic helps the young reader skip over some of this as-yet-imponderable mysteries and supplies instead a set of inchoate influences that organize a mystifying world to the young mind.” What role and significance does magic hold in the world of adult readers?
GM: At this point in my life I think fantasy is largely a gift for the young. I don’t seek it out to read as an adult (though I do love to return to books I loved as a child). There are some exceptions. The Philip Pullman novels come close to matching, in moral seriousness, what Ursula Le Guin managed in her Earthsea books. But I think a sort of disservice has been done to the reading of fantasy by the technical marvels of CGI in the film industry. When virtually anything can be pictured, and pictured convincingly, thanks to the wizardry of computer animation etc., then the thrill of reading of something impossible happening on the page is somewhat demoted.
The strength of fantasy in the lives of children is still potent, though. Fantasy still has power to charm because children have not yet finished pacing off the dimensions of the structure of reality. In fantasy, they are playing with “what might be” without being entirely sure. Of course once they get to the age of five, most children realize that humans don’t fly, and can’t fly, and they won’t—and yet they can fly in their dreams! So what’s that all about? And there are other enchantments (the thrill of romance and sex, when they get there) that will seem to open up the world to them in ways they couldn’t have anticipated a year or two earlier.
While adults, having convinced themselves that they’ve (largely) got the measure of reality, must approach fantasy in literature with a different expectation. Indulging in that literary art is a bit nostalgic, perhaps; it can more easily be read as metaphoric; in any case fantasy is at least diverting and a consolation, allowing one to turn away from the vicissitudes of our increasingly hostile and dangerous life on this planet. But as a rule, fantasy literature for adults can no longer tempt as a possible alternative construction to reality that we might someday find our way into embracing—as Laura does, in my story. That magic casement is closed. Peter Pan knows it, and so even does Mary Poppins.
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, forinstance, 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.
