Revtai, Donna M.

Certain elements in P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins (1934) and Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935) depict concerns that feminist critics deem important, such as mother figures, females as artists, women who exert power or lack it, female self-concepts, matrilineal connections and mother/child relationships. Travers sometimes treats these subjects ambiguously or ambivalently, but her attention to them indicates a riveting interest at the time. Her creative process whereby she projected childhood fantasies onto her ideal nanny, Mary Poppins, with whom she identified herself and others, relates to a feminine psychology. Travers's cyclic and web-like plots may link her to feminist aesthetics as currently being explored.