Lady Anne Bonny (Dates Unknown)

Lady Anne Bonny was the pen name of an unknown author. She had just one story in Weird Tales, a three-part serial called "Wings of Power," published in the issues of January, February, and March of 1925. "Wings of Power" is called a "Pseudo-Scientific Novel" in the table of contents. The pseudonym of the author and the title of the story would seem incongruous, for Anne Bonny was a real person, a lady pirate, active for just a few short months in 1720 when there was no such thing as a "pseudo-scientific story," and almost no science at all. No one knows when or where she was born, nor when or where she died. Lady Anne Bonny the author is unknown, and her namesake lady pirate is very nearly unknown.

"Wings of Power" is a long, melodramatic story with a very full cast of characters. There is a mad-scientist type, Professor Kurt Maquarri, and a damsel in distress, his step-daughter Joan Suffern, who does a lot of sufferin'. The science is nonsense, but pseudoscientific nonsense in a story can be fun sometimes. You just have to give up your knowledge of real science and go along for the ride. I wrote that the author's name and the title of her story would seem incongruous, but the pirate Blackbeard figures in it, though not very prominently. I haven't read the story, only breezed through it, looking for clues as to the author's identity. I didn't find anything conclusive. I also read "The Eyrie" for the months after "Wings of Power" was published. I didn't see any mention of it. I take that to mean that, although no one hated it, also no one loved it. Lady Anne Bonny seems to have come and gone. Did she ever write under her own name?

There's just one thing: in the same issues in which "Wings of Power" was published, there were illustrations by an artist named Jessie Bond, who sometimes used "Bonny" as her nickname, who was also a writer, and who was drawn to the subtropics of Florida and the Bahamas. Anne Bonny the pirate got her start by stealing a ship in the Bahamas. So could Jessie Bond, aka Bonny Bond, have been Lady Anne Bonny? Could she have written in collaboration with someone else, such as Farnsworth Wright?

The heading for part one of "Wings of Power" by Lady Anne Bonny, Weird Tales, January 1925, illustration by Andrew Brosnatch.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley