Pamela Lyndon Travers

Travers, Pamela Lyndon (1906–96), Australian writer and essayist of Irish and Scottish descent, best known for her Mary Poppins (1934), which Disney made into a movie in 1964, starring Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins and Dick Van Dyke as her friend Bert. Her 1934 book about an eccentric nanny with magical powers was followed by a series of others, including Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), and Mary Poppins in the Park (1952). In 1975 Travers published About the Sleeping Beauty, a collection of five versions of the tale (by the Grimms, Charles Perrault, Giambattista Basile, Jeremiah Curtin, and F. Bradley‐Birt) along with her own retelling. Travers has written many essays on folklore and myth which have appeared regularly in the review Parabola and have been republished, along with some of her own tales and retellings, in What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story (1989).

— Anne Duggan