Like many children growing up in the 1960s, my first encounter with Mary Poppins was through the Disney film. The books followed soon but required an unwelcome adjustment of perception. “Shiny black hair … like a wooden Dutch doll”? “… Thin, with large feet and hands and small, rather peering blue eyes”? This was not the crisp young songbird of heart-shaped face, the Julie Andrews I had so admired. This was someone altogether more disagreeable, even scary. Walt Disney and his minions, however, knew what would make an international crowd-pleaser that would enchant for five decades so far. Mary Poppins’ creator, the Australian-born woman who called herself Pamela Lyndon Travers, had first brought her supernatural nanny to readers in 1934. As early