Mary Read Mary Read Mary Read (1685 – 28 April 1721), also known as Mark Read, was an English pirate. She and Anne Bonny are two of the most famed female pirates of all time, and among the few women known to have been convicted of piracy during the early 18th century, at the height of the Golden Age of Piracy. Mary Read was illegitimately born in England in 1685. Her mother had married a sailor and had a son. After her husband disappeared at sea, Mary's mother became pregnant from an affair. Read's mother attempted to hide the pregnancy by going
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,