Mary Poppins opened last year in London's West End in Cameron Mackintosh's musical production and has proved a huge success predicted to run for at least five years. Next year it is due to open on Broadway in New york. Meanwhile the Disney film has just been re-released on DVD, and the books remain in print and as classic as ever. But this is the first full biography of the woman who wrote the Mary Poppins books, and a fascinating and extraordinary life it was too. P.L. Travers was Australian, came to London as a journalist early in the twentieth century, became involved with Theosophism, got to know W.B. Yeats and George Russell, took her lifelong quest for guru-figures on to Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti - and lived into her nineties. By the end of her life, in the seventies, she was living in a flat off London's Kings Road and going to chat to the punks outside Malcolm McLaren's clothing shop! Not only is Valerie Lawson's book a truly compulsive account of a remarkable life that spanned most of the twentieth century: it also sheds a fascinating light on the writing, and the true essence, of the Mary Poppins books: Mary Poppins herself was above all a kind of guru-figure who floated in and out of the Banks family's life to show them the possibility of other worlds...