I actually believe she liked the film a lot more than she let on publicly ... You have to remember that she was, above all, a great storyteller. And in the long line of storytellers who have faith in an oral tradition, who believe that for a great book or books to survive, they have to be retold or reinvented for each generation
LiteratureFictionTraditionLegacyPublic perceptionStorytelling
Public statements may not reflect private feelings, making interpretation speculative.
Pamela Travers appears and disappears as magically as the nanny she created. The New Yorker is the latest to discover the real Travers, the Australian who inve…
She felt very much alone. She did not make friends very easily, but I don't want to make out that she was always miserable. When she was in middle age, she was…
Mary Poppins seems the epitome of the punishing governess, the bullying woman who has an apt saying for every occasion, and who subdues children as they were s…
The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name wi…
People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can neve…
Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.