Helen Lyndon Goff, known within her family as Lyndon, was born on 9 August 1899 in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia. Her mother, Margaret Agnes Goff (née Morehead), was Australian and the niece of Boyd Dunlop Morehead, Premier of Queensland from 1888 to 1890. Her father, Travers Robert Goff, was born in Peckham, South East London, England, in 1863 of parents who were both the children of Irish clergymen. He was unsuccessful as a bank manager owing to his alcoholism, and was eventually demoted to the position of bank clerk. The family lived in a large home with servants in Maryborough until Lyndon was five years old, when they relocated to Allora in 1905. Two years later, Travers Goff died at home at the age of 43.

Following her father’s death, Goff, along with her mother and sisters, moved to Bowral, New South Wales, in 1907, living there until 1917. She boarded at the now-defunct Normanhurst School in Ashfield, a suburb of Sydney, during World War I.

Goff began publishing her poems while still a teenager. She wrote for The Bulletin and Triad and began gaining a reputation as an actress under the stage name “Pamela Lyndon Travers”. She toured Australia and New Zealand with Allan Wilkie’s Shakespearean Company, before leaving for England in 1924. There, she changed her name to “Pamela Travers”, keeping “Lyndon” as her middle name, to act and dance on stage, a career move opposed by her family. In 1931, she moved with her friend Madge Burnand from their rented flat in London to a thatched cottage in Sussex. There, in the winter of 1933, she began to write Mary Poppins.

While in Ireland in 1925, Travers met the poet George William Russell (who wrote under the name “Æ”) who, as editor of the Irish Statesman, accepted some of her poems for publication. Through Russell, whose kindness towards younger writers was legendary, Travers met W. B. Yeats, Oliver St. John Gogarty, and other Irish poets who fostered her interest in and knowledge of world mythology. She had studied the Fourth Way teachings of George Gurdjieff under Jane Heap and, in March 1936 with the help of Jessie Orage (widow of Alfred Richard Orage), she met Gurdjieff, who would have a great effect on her. She met several other literary figures as well.

As early as 1926, Travers published a short story, “Mary Poppins and the Match Man,” which introduced the nanny character of Mary Poppins and Bert the street artist. Published in London in 1934, Mary Poppins, the children’s book, was Travers’s first literary success. Seven sequels followed, the last in 1988, when Travers was 89.

Travers returned to England, making only one brief visit to Sydney, in 1960, while on her way to Japan to study Zen mysticism.

The musical film adaptation Mary Poppins was released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1964. Primarily based on the original 1934 novel of the same name, it also lifted elements from the 1935 sequel Mary Poppins Comes Back. The novels were loved by Disney’s daughters when they were children, and Disney spent 20 years trying to purchase the film rights to Mary Poppins, which included visits to Travers at her home in London. In 1961, Travers arrived in Los Angeles on a flight from London, her first-class ticket having been paid for by Disney, and finally agreed to sell the rights. Travers was an adviser in the production, but she disapproved of the Poppins character in its Disney version; with harsher aspects diluted, she felt ambivalent about the music and she so hated the use of animation that she ruled out any further adaptations of the series. She received no invitation to the film’s star-studded première until she “embarrassed a Disney executive into extending one.” At the after-party, she said loudly “Well. The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence.” Disney replied, “Pamela, the ship has sailed” and walked away.

While appearing as a guest on BBC Radio 4’s radio programme Desert Island Discs in May 1977, Travers revealed that the name “M. Poppins” originated from childhood stories that she contrived for her sisters, and that she was still in possession of a book from that era with this name inscribed within. Travers’s great aunt, Helen Morehead, who lived in Woollahra, Sydney, and used to say “Spit spot, into bed,” is a likely inspiration for the character.

In a 1977 interview on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, Travers remarked about the film, “I’ve seen it once or twice, and I’ve learned to live with it. It’s glamorous and it’s a good film on its own level, but I don’t think it is very like my books.”

Travers was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1977 New Year Honours. She died in London on 23 April 1996 at the age of 96. Although Travers never fully accepted the way the Disney film version of Mary Poppins had portrayed her nanny figure, the film did make her rich. The value of Travers’ estate was probated in September 1996 at £2,044,708.

Camillus died in London in November 2011. He was over 70, but his life had nonetheless been cut short from the effects of alcoholic excess.

The 2013 motion picture Saving Mr. Banks is a dramatised retelling of both the working process during the planning of Mary Poppins and of Travers’s early life, drawing parallels with Mary Poppins and that of the author’s childhood. The movie stars Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney.

In 2018, 54 years after the release of the original Mary Poppins film, a sequel was released titled Mary Poppins Returns, with Emily Blunt starring as Mary Poppins. The film is set 25 years after the events of the first film, in which Mary Poppins returns to help Jane and Michael one year after a family tragedy.