Mary Poppins Comes Back by P.L. Travers

Mary Poppins Comes Back cover

Mary Poppins Comes Back by P.L. Travers was first published in 1935 but my copy is a 1997 paperback. For years I thought there was only the one Mary Poppins book, but this one is the second of four. It’s illustrated by Mary Shepard.

Nothing seems to have gone right within the Banks household for ages, probably not since Mary Poppins left them in fact. The boot boy has polished Mr Banks’s bowler hat with boot polish and to make matters even worse Mr Banks has just had a letter from his old nanny. She’s coming to stay with them and he’s horrified by that idea. Lots of children’s nannies have come and gone since Mary Poppins left but nobody but Mary can cope with them. There are five children in the family so it is quite a handful, especially as they Miss Mary Poppins so much.

Mrs Banks is being driven mad by them all and she tells Jane and Michael to take the twins to the park in their perambulator. Michael takes his kite to fly and when it flies so high in the sky that they can’t see it the Park Keeper helps to haul on its string. But it isn’t their green and yellow kite which appears, it’s something navy blue and as it hurtles towards them they realise that it’s Mary Poppins – she has come back just as suddenly as she had left.

Mary Poppins is of course completely different from the Disney version, she leads the children into all sorts of adventures, they meet strange people and Mary Poppins isn’t at all sweet or even caring, but they have great fun.

Apparently P.L. Travers was so upset by the Disney film version of her first book that she stipulated in her will that no other films were to be made after her death.

4 thoughts on “Mary Poppins Comes Back by P.L. Travers

  1. I think I might have read some of the Mary Poppins books as a child, although I’m not completely sure – if I did, they mustn’t have made much of an impression on me. I did used to love the film, but I can understand why P. L. Travers would have been unhappy about it.

    • Helen,
      There are definitely far better children’s books around. I loved the film too, but Mary Poppins is nothing like the one in the film. She’s quite nasty really.

  2. The new film, has Mary Poppins coming back just as you described. I have the omnibus edition of all her novels, but not read any in a while.

    The new film is excellent but I think it is the stage show which shows Mary Poppins as most like her characters in the books.

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