'I wrote it for myself,' she told the BBC. It never occurred to Travers, as she began writing the first book, that anyone would want to publish it. Unlike the Banks family in Disney's film adaption, the middle-class Banks family in Travers's books struggles financially and lives in 'the smallest house in the Lane,” which is “rather dilapidated and needs a coat of paint,' according to the New Yorker. By the end of the second World War, nannies had all but disappeared. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, an expert and author on the social history of the British nanny and public school system, dates the first appearance of the British nanny in the nursery at around 1850, according to a 1973 article in The New York Times. Travers set her stories in Depression-era London, when the use of nursery nannies was more common. You will find her occasionally in the pages of Mary Poppins.' 'I suddenly realised that there is a book through which Aunt Sass, stern and tender, secret and proud, anonymous and loving, stalks with her silent feet. We do not guess at the roots that made our fruit,' she writes. 'We write more than we know we are writing. In Aunt Sass, Travers explains she was subconsciously inspired by her real-life aunt-turned-nanny-and didn't realize how much she'd drawn from her own experience until later in life. Poppins' written in the flyleaf of one of her favorite books as a child. The name, Travers told the BBC, came from the inscription 'M. It was in 1924, while Travers worked as a journalist at a London newspaper, that she came up with the idea for a novel about a whimsical-yet-stern nanny called Mary Poppins.

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