Mary Poppins’ Creator Dies At 96

P.L. Travers, the author whose magical Mary Poppins slid up banisters, popped into paintings and produced endless items from an empty carpetbag, has died at age 96.

Travers died at her London home on Tuesday, her family said. The cause of death was not announced.

“Mary Poppins,” published in 1934, was the first of four books about the extraordinary nanny who arrived with the wind to look after two small children in Edwardian London.

Travers did not wholly approve of the 1964 Walt Disney film which won five Academy Awards and starred Julie Andrews as a young, vivacious Mary Poppins who kept breaking into song. “They missed the point,” she once said. “It’s not about sugar and spice, but something from which we grown-ups can learn.”

Pamela Lyndon Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Australia, of Irish parents. Travers was her father’s first name.

Travers lived for a time with Navajos in the American West and studied Zen Buddhism. Her last book, a collection of essays titled “What the Bee Knows,” included her reflections on astrology, crop circles, reincarnation and journalists who ask “stupid” questions.