PL Travers Books in Order

If you want the classic Mary Poppins novels: Mary Poppins → Mary Poppins Comes Back → Mary Poppins Opens the Door → Mary Poppins in the Park
If you want later Cherry Tree Lane adventures: Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane → Mary Poppins and the House Next Door
If you prefer stand alone children’s fiction: I Go by Sea, I Go by Land → Friend Monkey → The Fox at the Manger
If you are curious about Travers and myth: About the Sleeping Beauty → What the Bee Knows → Two Pairs of Shoes
If you like shorter Mary Poppins tales: The Gingerbread Shop → Mr. Wigg's Birthday Party → Mary Poppins from A to Z

P. L. Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff in 1899 in the Queensland town of Maryborough, Australia, and spent her early years between a bank manager's flat and the wide Australian bush. Her father loved stories and Ireland, her mother brought sharp maxims and Scottish and Irish ancestry, and both threads ran through the tales she would later tell.

When her father died while she was still a child, the family moved often and money was tight. Books, daydreams and the companionship of a formidable great aunt helped steady her. At school near Sydney she threw herself into reading and performing, acting in Shakespeare and writing poems that began to appear in local magazines.

As a young woman she worked first as a Shakespearean actress and then as a journalist, taking the stage name Pamela Lyndon Travers. In 1924 she sailed to England, determined to make a life out of words. London and Dublin opened new doors for her: she fell in with Irish writers such as George Russell and W. B. Yeats, and through them deepened a lifelong fascination with myth, folklore and spiritual traditions.

Those interests sit quietly behind Mary Poppins. Travers started writing about the mysterious nanny in the 1920s, drawing on stories she had invented for children she knew. Living in a thatched cottage in Sussex, she began shaping the first novel, and in 1934 Mary Poppins appeared in print. Readers met a brisk, vain, utterly competent London nanny who could ride the wind, talk to stars and yet insist that nursery rules be kept.

The book was a success, and seven more Mary Poppins volumes followed over the next five decades. The stories stay close to the Banks children in Cherry Tree Lane, but their adventures wander far, into the night zoo, under the sea, into the cracks of time and up to the constellations. Travers liked to say that she did not write for children in particular; she wrote the stories that felt true to her and trusted that the right readers would find them.

Alongside the Poppins books she produced other work. I Go by Sea, I Go by Land follows English children evacuated overseas during the Second World War. Friend Monkey is a Victorian era fantasy about a troublesome yet loyal animal companion. In About the Sleeping Beauty and What the Bee Knows she turned directly to myth and fairy tale, retelling old stories and reflecting on why such patterns matter in ordinary lives.

During the war she worked for the British Ministry of Information and spent extended periods in the United States, where she also lived among Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo communities to learn about their stories and ceremonies. Later she taught and lectured at colleges, wrote essays, and served as an editor for a journal devoted to myth and tradition. The public often saw her as reserved, but friends also remembered her dry humour and intense curiosity.

Travers never married. In middle age she adopted an Irish boy, Camillus, and brought him to live with her in London. She guarded her private life carefully, preferring that readers look to the books rather than to her own history. Late in life she watched Mary Poppins adapted into a hugely popular film and, later, a stage musical, reacting with a mixture of gratitude, irritation and wry amusement. Awarded the honour of OBE in 1977, she wrote well into old age and died in London in 1996, aged ninety six, leaving a body of work that treats stories themselves as a kind of practical magic.