Anne Bonny is recorded that Bonny had red hair and was considered a "good catch", but may have had a fiery temper; at age 13, she supposedly stabbed a servant girl with a knife. She married a poor sailor and small-time pirate named James Bonny. James hoped to win possession of his father-in-law's estate, but Bonny was disowned by her father. Bonny's father did not approve of James Bonny as a husband for his daughter and he kicked Anne out of their house. There is a story that Bonny set fire to her father's plantation in retaliation; but no evidence exists in
Ern Malley letter, purported to be from Ethel, containing the poems, and asking for his opinion of her late brother's work. Harris read the poems with, as he later recalled, a mounting sense of excitement. Ern Malley, he thought, was a poet in the same class as W. H. Auden or Dylan Thomas. He showed them to his circle of literary friends, who agreed that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great importance had been discovered in suburban Australia. He decided to rush out a special edition of "Angry Penguins" and commissioned a painting by Sidney Nolan, based on the poems,