A beautiful young P.L. Travers as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream c. 1920, photographer unknown. Source: Wikimedia Commons What Saving Mr Banks tells us about the original Mary Poppins". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 May 2017 Later add-ons were Mary Poppins From A to Z(1962), Mary Poppins in the Kitchen(1975), Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane(1982), and finally, Mary Poppins and the House Next Door (1988).

Mary Poppins is not nice. She arrives, to be the nanny for the four Banks children, riding a puff of wind; she understands, and can be understood by, animals; she can take you round the world in about two minutes; and the medicine she gives you will taste like whatever your heart desires (lime-juice cordial for Jane Banks; milk for the infant Banks twins) — but a spoonful of sugar, to quote the very sugary movie, is nowhere in sight.Margaret Baguley was awarded a Princeton University Library Research Grant to assist with the research on Mary Shepard and her contribution to the Mary Poppins series of books. Margaret Baguley is President of Art Education Australia and the visual arts representative on the National Advocates for Arts Education. In 1964, Mary Poppins was produced into a Disney film. In 2013, the film Saving Mr. Banksstarring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks was created to tell the story of the making of Mary Poppins and the fraught relationship between Travers and Walt Disney. Here’s an excerpt from a Smithsonian Magazine article on how this “based on a true story” might have been slightly sugar-coated: Burness, Edwina; Griswold, Jerry (Winter 1982). "P. L. Travers, The Art of Fiction". The Paris Review. Winter 1982 (63).

The new movie proclaims it is ‘based on a true story,’ a cheery phrase that cleverly balances truth-telling and let’s-pretend.Saving Mr. Banksis not a documentary, but a highly entertaining feature film loosely based on the deeply antagonistic collaboration between two very strong-willed artists.”Lawson, Valerie (1999). Out of the Sky She Came: The Life of P.L. Travers, Creator of Mary Poppins. Hodder. ISBN 978-0-7336-1072-1.

P.L. Travers (August 9, 1899 – April 23, 1996), full name Pamela Lyndon Travers, was an Australian-born authorbest remembered as the author of the Mary Poppins series of books. Enough of this complexity made it into the movie, however, to preserve its original flavour and even, perhaps, to deepen it. I have a theory that the Bird Woman is Poppins’s alter ego: despised and destitute, the mad old bat whom women like PL Travers were expected to become – invisible, husbandless and in need of a chin wax. She is the crone in the snow globe whom Poppins compels us to see. Mary Poppins, one of the best-loved characters in children’s literature, came from a little story she made up while babysitting two young children. It first became a book, then a series, and the basis of the renowned 1964 Disney musical film, which greatly displeased the author. Travers wrote other children’s books as well as books for adults focused on mythology. Early life in Australia Aladdin' Opens at New Amsterdam Theatre, 'Mary Poppins' Closing March 3". BroadwayTour. 8 January 2013 . Retrieved 1 April 2013.

Neither was she sentimental. Poppins had little time for the Bird Woman, the vagrant stationed on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, and on the issue of avian welfare in the capital went further even than Dawes Sr – “Feed the birds and what have you got? Fat birds!” – by suggesting they should be baked in a pie.