THE SHADOW OF MARY POPPINS explores the complex and troubled life of the creator of Mary Poppins, Pamela Travers. The au | dG1fcVM0ZDFYeUQyR1k
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00:00 The Disney film portrayed Mary Poppins as sugar and spice, but Pamela's original character
00:12 in the books was a much deeper reflection of her own spiritual beliefs.
00:18 As I understand Mary Poppins, she arrives, she sees there's a situation that's not quite
00:25 right and when she's intervened and the situation has been transformed in some way, she goes.
00:35 And that's an absolutely mythological pattern.
00:40 Certainly if you look at the later Mary Poppins books, there is much more an emphasis on the
00:44 mystic, on the zen, on the idea of Mary being something much bigger than just a nanny.
00:54 Pamela wrote eight Mary Poppins books over six decades and as her spiritual search deepened,
01:00 so did the content of her books.
01:04 The range of activities that this extraordinary nanny, this almost cosmic nanny, enters.
01:11 She talks to and knows Orion.
01:14 She dances with the sun.
01:16 She seems to be kind of embedded in and at ease in a mythological universe.
01:22 The mythic aspect and the zen aspect, although they may not even be articulated by the young
01:27 readers, are definitely explanations of the universal appeal of Mary Poppins.
01:42 My main interest, as you will guess from all these books, Mary Poppins and everything,
01:46 is in myth, legend, folklore, fairy tale, poetry.
01:50 I think Mary Poppins, everything I've written, springs out of that.
01:56 Pamela's deep devotion to myth was first explored in her book, Fox at the Manger, in 1963.
02:05 We had republished Mary Poppins and some of her new Mary Poppins books and then suddenly
02:09 she landed on us a myth, The Fox at the Manger.
02:16 And she insisted on having an adult editor rather than one of the children's editors
02:19 to look after it.
02:21 And I took it up and it was a charming book.
02:27 Pamela wrote two more books exploring her love of myth in Friend Monkey and About the
02:32 Sleeping Beauty, a tribute to her favourite fairy tale.
02:37 None of the books came anywhere near the success of Mary Poppins, but Pamela continued her
02:42 love of myth and eventually co-founded Parabola, a magazine of myth and tradition, in New York
02:47 in 1976.
02:51 It's difficult to translate Gilgamesh for our modern ears, even the Grail, even Western
02:58 myths.