AUTHORS

Thomas Paine National Historica

2010-07-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

The Thomas Paine National Historical Association, founded January 29, 1884 in New York City, is among the oldest historical associations in the United States. Our mission, to educate the world about the life, times and works of Thomas Paine, is designed to ensure Paine's rightful place in history as the preeminent founder of the United States of America. He was, in fact, the first person to coin this phrase. In the course of his lifetime, Paine was an outstanding political and social influence upon the entire world.

Dr. Moncure Conway was elected the Association's first president. A noted writer, abolitionist, and confidant to Abraham Lincoln, Conway is credited with writing the first comprehensive biography of Paine in 1892. In 1925, under the leadership of President William van der Weyde and Vice-President Thomas Alva Edison, the Association undertook the initiative to build a museum to house the priceless documents and artifacts of Paine's life. Since then, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association has been located in New Rochelle, New York on the site of Thomas Paine's farm and shared by the Museum, Thomas Paine Cottage, and Thomas Paine Monument. In addition to the acquisition, preservation, and conservation of documents and artifacts relating to Thomas Paine, the Association offers educational programs, public speakers, presentations, and special events that illuminate Paine's political and social philosophy and demonstrate its relevance to the issues of the day.

2010-07-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

"London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books."

Birthplace

London, England

Education

Clare College, Cambridge; Yale University, US

Other jobs

Critic and journalist

Did you know?

One of his lesser-known early works is Dressing Up, a history of drag and transvestism.

Critical verdict

Ackroyd began his literary career as a poet before moving into fiction, and has also written imaginatively convincing biographies of TS Eliot, Dickens, Blake and Thomas More. He excels in the dual narrative - two voices separated by centuries - and has consistently focused on London, its change and its continuity, as his subject and structure. Combining accessibility with scholarship and extensive research, his work has blurred the boundaries between biography and fiction and been critically and commercially successful.

Recommended works

Hawksmoor; Chatterton (shortlisted for the Booker Prize); his compelling Blake biography; the inexhaustible London: The Biography.

Influences

Ackroyd follows in the tradition of the great chroniclers of London, Wiliam Blake and Charles Dickens.

Now read on

Perfume by Patrick Süskind echoes Ackroyd's sensory reimagining of the past; The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles adopts the history-spanning dual narrative. Michael Moorcock's Mother London focuses on the capital as a locus of history, while Iain Sinclair also searches out London's dark past.

Recommended biography

Iain Sinclair remarked that Ackroyd's grandly ambitious London: The Biography "very rapidly announces itself as Peter Ackroyd: The Autobiography".

Criticism

Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (1999) by Susana Onega is the first full-length study of Ackroyd's 'historiographic metafiction'.

Useful links and work online

Online work
· Excerpt: The Life of Thomas More
· Excerpt: Milton in America

Rg Gregory (1928 - present)

2010-04-20T00:45:00.000-07:00

Born Southampton 1928; Army (Education Corps) England and Germany 1946-49; King’s London (English degree 49-52); teacher Hampshire, Uganda, Shropshire 53-72; Word And Action 72-03 (retired on 75th birthday). Six children (one dead) from two long relationships; married again June 2006. Have lived in Dorset since 1972. Moving to Market Drayton Shropshire end of August 2006.

Teacher (English /Drama) 52-72; Founder/Member of Word And Action (Dorset) – Language-Arts organisation - 72-03; Poet (haiku to book-length poems); Director/Actor/Playwright,Theatre-in-the-Round since 59; Inventor of Instant Theatre (participatory performances for all-ages); Polemical books/articles (education/theatre); Early short-stories / late novels; Word-art productions.

Poems over the years in many small magazines. Publications include Glimpses of Dorset (1996); Imperfect Eden – over 9-hour recording of 10,000 line poem in rhyme royal about childhood in Southampton in the 1930s. (2001).

Collections of poems: The Simple Stream; Heart’s Fangs, The Desiring Discus (3 anthologies of poems 1945-1989). Poems from the Year of the Metal Horse (1990-91). Towards Jerusalem (1989-93). Beyond Jerusalem (1993-95). Bee-attitudes (1995-97). Bluefish (1998-1999). The Millennial Edge (2000-01). Flower Power (2002). Herod’s Legacy (2003-04). The Rescue Package (2005).

Sequences: Crossing the Line (1966). Proverbs of Hell (1971). Thirteeners* (1978). Imperfect Eden (2001).

(* In 1978 invented the THIRTEENER, a kind of rough sonnet, limited to three rhymed endings. Have practised the form since over 200 times. )

Book-length single poems: My Cuttings (poem plus 58 collages – photo-play - 1972). The Ansty Experience (1993).

Themed Collections: Action Poems. Growing-Up Poems. Enigmas and Obsessions. Long Poems. Potpourri for Christmas. A Tipple of Shorts.

Poem-graphics: computer graphics – over 500 at A6, A5 and A4 sizes – using short and shortish poems of my own).

Other: Over twenty verse plays for school, youth and adult groups (all written for performance in the round). Ten Chapbooks on literary, dramatic and educational themes.

Much non-published work – inc The Group Dream – a commentary on 130 stories from Instant Theatre (over 600 pages long; 8 years to write).

Have worked as playwright, director, actor, with school, youth and adult groups – always in the round since 1959. Much poetry in performance. Now give “animated readings” of my work – reading from text performances in the round. Have run many courses in the making of plays and poems; in the philosophy and practice of Instant Theatre.

Believe prose and poetry have different functions. In prose use all punctuation devices meticulously. In poetry have graduated to using lower case, brackets, dashes and apostrophes. The movement of my poems strongly affected by this deliberate style.

Helen Dunmore (1952 - present)

2010-04-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

Born in Yorkshire in 1952, Helen Dunmore studied English at York University and taught in Finland for two years before publishing her first book. She has worked as a writer, reader, performer and eacher of Poetry and Creative Writing, tutoring residential writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and taking part in the Poetry Society's Writer in Schools scheme. She has also taught at the University of Glamorgan, the University of Bristol's Continuing Education Department and for the Open College of the Arts. She also reviews for The Times and The Observer, contributes to arts programmes on BBC Radio and has been a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year award.

Her poetry collections include The Apple Fall (1983), The Sea Skater (1986), which won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award in 1987, The Raw Garden (1988) and Short Days, Long Nights: New and Selected Poems (1991). Her novels include Zennor in Darkness (1993), winner of the McKitterick Prize, a fictional account of

D. H. Lawrence's life in Cornwall during the First World War; the acclaimed A Spell of Winter (1995), about a brother and sister brought up by their grandfather in his decaying house in the country, winner of the first Orange Prize for Fiction; Talking to the Dead (1996), a tale of two sisters locked in an intense, obsessive relationship; Your Blue-Eyed Boy (1998), the story of a judge's fight to take control of both her professional and personal lives; and With Your Crooked Heart (1999), a story of two brothers, set in contemporary London. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Love of Fat Men (1997) and Ice Cream (2000).

She has written a number of books for children, including Secrets (1994), which won the Signal Poetry Award, and the novels Brother, Brother, Sister, Sister (1999) and The Zillah Rebellion (2001).

Her recent novel for adults, The Siege (2001), shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, is set during the siege of Leningrad in 1941. Mourning Ruby (2003), is a story about memory, love and history.

Helen Dunmore is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest book is House of Orphans (2006), a historical novel set in Finland.

Ros Barber (1964 - present)

2010-04-20T00:39:00.000-07:00

Ros Barber (born 1964) is a British poet and writer. Barber was born in Washington D.C., where her father was working for the US government, and grew up in Essex, later moving to Sussex to study for a Biology degree. Both parents are physicists by training, and Barber has a strong interest in science and mathematics which comes through in the formal aspects of many of her poems.

Her first full collection of poetry, How Things Are On Thursday (Anvil, 2004) came after seventeen years of appearing frequently in anthologies, poetry magazines and prize shortlists. Not the Usual Grasses Singing (Four Shores, 2005), the result of a public art commission, is a book about the Isle of Sheppey written entirely in rhyming couplets. Her next book from Anvil, Material, is due to be published in early 2008. She also writes fiction.

Many of Barber's personal poems are concerned with the constrained expression of high emotion; she works frequently in form (both rhyme and metre), and conveys human difficulties with honesty, directness, and a wry, dark humour. She is well known in the South of England for her public poetry commissions, which are largely site-specific or place based, connecting landscapes or urban environments to their histories.

Writing in a richly imagistic but accessible style, and adept and transferring both her voice and the voices of others to the page, Barber is also a striking performer of her own work.

A Master of Wuxia Novel Writer: Jin Yong (THE LIST OF HIS NOVELS)

2010-04-10T01:36:00.000-07:00

1.          The Book and the Sword - (first published on The New Evening Post in 1955)

2.         Sword Stained with Royal Blood - (first published on Hong Kong Commercial Daily in 1956)

3.         The Legend of the Condor Heroes - (first published on Hong Kong Commercial Daily in 1957)

4.         Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain - (first installment appeared on the first issue of Ming Pao in 1959)

5.         The Return of the Condor Heroes - (1959)

6.         Other Tales of the Flying Fox - (1960)

7.         Blade-dance of the Two Lovers - (first published on Ming Pao in 1961)

8.        Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre - (first published on Ming Pao in 1961)

9.         A Deadly Secret - (first published on Southeast Asia Weekly in 1963)

10.     Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils - (1963)

11.     Ode to Gallantry - (1965)

12.     The Smiling, Proud Wanderer - (first published on Ming Pao in 1967)

13.     The Deer and the Cauldron - (1969-1972)

14.     Sword of the Yue Maiden - (1970)

A Master of Wuxia Novel Writer: Jin Yong

2010-04-10T01:33:00.000-07:00

Louis Cha, GBM, OBE born 6 February 1924), known with his pen name Jin Yong is one of the most influential modern Chinese-language novelists. Co-founder of the Hong Kong daily Ming Pao, which he started in 1959, he was the paper's first editor-in-chief and held this position until 1993, when he retired. He has also written and directed two films.

Cha's fiction, which are of the Wuxia ("martial arts and chivalry") genre, has a widespread following in Chinese-speaking areas, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and United States. His fourteen novels and a short fiction composed between 1955 and 1972 earned him a reputation as one of the finest Wuxia writers ever. He is currently the best-selling Chinese author alive; over 100 million copies of his works have been sold worldwide (not including unknown number of bootleg copies)

Cha's works have been translated into Korean, English, Japanese, French, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Burmese and Thai and he has many fans abroad as well, thanks to the numerous adaptations of his works made into films, television series, manhua (comic books), and video games.
A native of Haining county, Zhejiang province, Republic of China, with ancestry from Wuyuan, a county of Shangrao prefecture in Jiangxi province, Cha is the second of seven children from an illustrious family of scholars; his grandfather was a jinshi. Cha was an avid reader of literature from an early age, especially of wuxia fiction, and of the classical fiction. He was once expelled from his high school for openly criticizing the Nationalist regime as autocratic. He first studied at the famous Hangzhou High School in 1937 but was dismissed in 1941 and then he studied in Zhejiang Province Jiaxing High School, and was admitted to the Faculty of Foreign Languages of the Central University, located in Chungking (Chongqing).Cha later transferred to the Faculty of Law at Dongwu University to major in International Law, with the intention of working as a foreign relations official.

In 1947, Cha entered Shanghai's newspaper Ta Kung Pao as a journalist. One year later, he was posted to the Hong Kong division as a copyeditor. He would reside in Hong Kong for the rest of his life. When Cha was transferred to Hsin Wan Pao as Deputy Editor, he met Chen Wentong, who in 1953 wrote his first wuxia novel under the pseudonym Liang Yusheng . Chen and Cha became good friends, and it was under the former's influence that Cha began work on his first serialized martial arts novel, The Book and the Sword, in 1955. In 1957, while still working on wuxia serializations, he quit his previous job and worked as a scenarist-director and scriptwriter at the Great Wall Movie Enterprises Ltd and Phoenix Film Company.

In 1959, together with fellow high-school mate Shen Pao Sing Cha founded the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao. Cha served as its Editor-in-Chief for years, writing both serialized novels and editorials, amounting to some 10,000 characters per day. His editorials were well respected, and Ming Pao gradually gained a reputation as one of Hong Kong's most highly rated press. His novels also earned him a large readership. Cha wrote his last wuxia novel in 1972, after which he officially retired from writing, and spent the remaining years of that decade editing and revising his literary works instead. The first complete definitive edition of his works appear in 1979. In 1980, Jin Yong wrote a postscript to Wu Gongzao's tai chi classic Wu Jia Taijiquan, in which he described influences from as far back as Laozi and Zhuangzi on contemporary Chinese martial arts.

By then, Cha's Wuxia novels have earned great popularity in Chinese-speaking areas. All of his novels have since been adapted into films, TV series and radio series in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China. The important characters in his novels are so well-known to the public that they can be alluded to with ease between all three regions.

In later years in the 1970s, Cha was involved in Hong Kong politics. He was a member of the Hong Kong Basic Law drafting committee, although, after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, he resigned in protest. He was also part of the Preparatory Committee set up in 1996 to supervise Hong Kong's transition by the Chinese government.

In 1993, Cha prepared for retirement from editorial work, selling all his shares in Ming Pao. Together with the royalties from his works, Cha's personal wealth is estimated at some HK$600 million.

JK Rowling gives new book green light

2010-04-10T01:30:00.000-07:00

Best-selling author Harry Potter J K Rowling has given her imprimatur to a new book about her wizard boy by superfan Melissa Anelli, who runs a Potter fan web site. USA Today says Rowling, who earlier this year won a lawsuit to block another fan from publishing a Potter lexicon, has written the foreword to Anelli's tome, Harry, a History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon.

Rowling writes that she's impressed by Anelli's fan site, Leaky Cauldron (leakynews.com), which gets more than a million hits a month.

Anelli says she thinks "there is a chance" Rowling may write an eighth Potter book. "If she returns to it, the book will be about Albus Severus Potter (son of Harry and Ginny Potter)," she says.

Mitja Čander

2010-04-10T01:21:00.000-07:00

Mitja Čander was born on 9 March 1974 in Maribor. He studied comparative literature at the Faculty of Art, Ljubljana University. He entered the Slovene literary arena in the 1990s. He started working as an editor with the student magazine Tribuna. Between 1995 and 2000 he was editing the literary supplement of the Maribor literary magazine Dialogi; since 1996 he has been editor of the literary collection Beletrina, which has transformed the former concept of literary publishing in Slovenia. In 2001 he edited the anthology of Slovene short prose written by younger Slovene authors, which has so far been published in English, Hungarian, Rоmanian, Croatian and Serbian translations (Macedonian and German translations are underway). Since 1992, Čander has published a considerable number of critical essays about Slovene and world literature. For his work he has received two major awards: the Stritar Award (1998) for the best young critic, and the Glazer Prize (2000) awarded by the city of Maribor for prominent achievements in the sphere of culture. Čander is also involved in various cultural activities for the young, and works as a columnist, dramaturge and screenwriter for documentary films.

Zapiski iz noči (Notes from the night) is the author’s first book of essays compiled betwen 2001 and 2003. It was awarded as the best first book. He is already writing his second book dedicated to contemporary Slovene prose.

AmitavaGhosh

2010-04-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

Amitav Ghosh, a pioneer of English literature in India, was born in Calcutta (Now Kolkata) in the year 1956. Amitav Ghosh has been raised and educated at the same time in as different locations as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India and the United Kingdom. He completed his higher studies in England where he went on to receive his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford University. After completing his Ph.D. he decided to pursue his career in writing.

Amitav Ghosh is acclaimed in the literary world for his works on fiction, travel writing and journalism. His long list of accomplishment includes books like The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous work, The Glass Palace, was an international bestseller that sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. Recently published there, The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad. Among awards, Ghosh has won France's Prix Medici Etranger, India's prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Pushcart Prize.

The fictions of Amitav Ghosh are marked by extreme themes that go side by side with post-colonialism. Nevertheless it will be nothing short of insult, for an author of his repute, to say that his works are formulaic. It is practically impossible to label his works. It can be added here that his topics are much more unique and personal. The appeal of Amitav' s work lies in his ability to weave "Indo-nostalgic" elements into more serious, heavier themes. The Government of India conferred Amitav Ghosh with Padma Bhushan. He now divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor, and his homes in India and Brooklyn, New York. He is planning to shift back to India.

Brad Pitt ( 1963 - )

2010-04-06T01:10:00.000-07:00

In 2007, he was listed on Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World list of affluent individuals. That’s not the only list that Brad Pitt has graced. He was elected to the select group of only three men when he was voted not once but twice as People Magazine’s "Sexiest Man Alive".

Brad Pitt is one of those men who could likely step into the role of a politician at any point and be well received. However, if he isn’t careful, he’ll be walking in his partner’s shadows. Joined without wedding bells ringing in the distance, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are a couple. They have four children together and the couple has been able to raise their family in New Orleans and California without too many unconventional pressures.

Brad Pitt, is now a father first. However, no one would know or care if it wasn’t for his quick rise to claim the fame he earned. Brad Pitt went to the University of Missouri at Columbia before he became a Hollywood A-lister. He trained under the notorious Roy London when he first found his place in Beverly Hills.

With small roles on Head of the Class, Another World, 21 JumpStreet and other television parts, Pitt was on his way. As success began to call his name, he found parts in the popular movies Thelma and Louise and Too Young to Die.

Soon, Legends of the Fall and the movie Seven would turn Mr. Pitt into a mega-star. By the time Oceans Eleven and Mr. and Mrs. Smith rolled around, Brad Pitt was a household name.

Brad Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston and the couple seemed like the All-American poster couple for matrimony. However, Mr. and Mrs. Smith changed things for Mr. and Mrs. Pitt. Soon, Jennifer Aniston filed for divorce and Brad Pitt was spotted vacationing with Angelina Jolie. However, Jolie came out publicly denying that an affair was already underway prior to Pitt’s separation. Still, the evidence was clear. Brad and Angelina were an item.

Today, Brad Pitt and his family are hot media topics when they travel. Brad Pitt and his family enjoy their role in philanthropy efforts and work hard to make a significant difference for better lives. He continues to act in films but thanks to his film credits, he can be a little choosy when accepting roles.

Tom A ( 1957 - -99999 )

2010-04-06T01:07:00.000-07:00

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Leroy Gordon Cooper

2010-04-06T01:04:00.000-07:00

Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., was one of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the first manned-space effort by the United States. He flew the longest space flight of the project, was the first American to sleep in orbit, and the last American to fly alone in earth orbit thus far. Born in Oklahoma to a farming family, he attended public schools and was an active Boy Scout, achieving the second highest rank of Life Scout. He joined the Marine Corps in 1945, and then received an officer's commission to the U.S. Army after completing three years of study at the University of Hawaii. He met his wife while at university. Trudy Cooper was the only wife of a Mercury astronaut who held a private pilot's license.

In 1949, Cooper transferred his commission to the Air Force and received flight training. His first flight assignment came in 1950 in Germany, where he flew F-84 Thunderjets and F-86 Sabres. He continued his university studies at the University of Maryland European Extension. Four years later he returned to the US and studied two more years at the Air Force Institute of Technology. In 1957 he completed the BS in aerospace engineering. At that point, Cooper was assigned to the Experimental Flight Test School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He served as a test pilot and project manager testing the F-102A and F-106B. He logged more than 7,000 hours of flight time, and flew all types of commercial and general aviation airplanes and helicopters.

With his extensive educational and practical background, Cooper was a prime candidate for the Mercury program. He was summoned to Washington, D.C. for a NASA briefing on the project. Cooper went through the lengthy and stressful selection process with the other 109 candidates but expressed no surprise when he was accepted to the program. Each Mercury astronaut was assigned to a different part of the project. Cooper specialized in the Redstone rocket (and developed a personal survival knife for astronauts to carry). He served as chair on several committees as well. His first flight into space took place on May 15, 1963 aboard the Mercury-Atlas 9 spacecraft during the last Mercury mission. He orbited the earth 22 times and logged more time in space than the previous five Mercury astronauts combined, 34 hours, 19 minutes and 49 seconds. He was not only the first American astronaut to sleep in orbit, he also fell asleep on the launch pad during a countdown. His cool attitude prevailed towards the end of the flight, when the capsule had a power failure. Using his self-devised, clever manual skills he was able to re-orient the capsule for re-entry entirely on his own, resulting in NASA's rethinking of design for future capsules.

Cooper later flew as command pilot on the Gemini 2 and Gemini 12 flights. He was selected as a backup commander for Apollo 10 and was scheduled to fly to the moon as commander of Apollo 13. However, he had a falling out with NASA, and Alan Shepard was chosen instead. Cooper retired from NASA and the Air Force in 1970, with the rank of colonel. His post-NASA years were filled with serving on corporate boards and as technical consultant for more than a dozen companies. During the 1970s he worked for The Walt Disney Company as they developed the Epcot Center. After his divorce from Trudy, Cooper married Suzan Taylor in 1972. The couple had two daughters of their own and raised the two daughters from his first marriage. Later in life Cooper developed Parkinson's disease. He died at age 77 from heart failure in his California home.

Arthur Korn

2010-04-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Arthur Korn was born in Breslau (now Wroclaw), Silesia on 4 June 1891. He studied at the Königliche Kunst und Kunstgewerbeschule (Royal Art and Trade School) in Berlin, and after WWI he worked briefly at the office of expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn. After military service during World War I, he joined the office of Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin, where he had already gained some pre-war experience in urban planning.

In the 1920's Korn became an advocate of Berlin's modernist architectural movement, and he associated with Bauhaus architects such as Walter Gropius and Ernst May. He published Glas. Im Bau und als Gebrauchsgegenstand (published in English as Glass in Modern Architecture) in 1929. In that book, Korn wrote, "[Glass] 'is noticeable yet not quite visible. It is the great membrane, full of mystery, delicate yet tough.''

Although he experience great popularity as an architect in Berlin, he was forbidden to practice in Nazi Germany, as he was Jewish. He left Berlin and first moved to Yugoslavia, then to London in 1938. He then joined the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group where, as chair of the town planning subcommittee, he drew up the modernist MARS plan for post-war London published in 1942.

Between 1941 and 1945 he taught architecture and planning at the Oxford School of Architecture, then, from 1945 at the Architectural Association in London. He retired in 1965 before moving to Austria in 1969.

Part Two: Putting Principles into Action

2009-12-10T07:38:00.002-08:00

These principles, identified by the authors, serve as a framework for building CSR and long-term value for any companies. Each of the seven principles is illustrated with case studies throughout the book.

Principle #1: Harness Innovation for Public Good

In a business framework as globalized as today’s is, corporate competitiveness is central to achieving sustainable growth. Many companies have come to understand that incorporating ethical and environmental innovation has indeed helped create a distinctive advantage. Companies examined throughout this chapter are amongst those that, through sustainable innovation, have become leaders in many industries.

One example that caught my attention is DuPont, a leader in the chemical industry. Going back to the late 1980s, when concerns about chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and the ozone layer were rising, DuPont strategically decided to invest in finding an alternative to using substances that deplete the ozone layer. After the 1990s, some of these tactics, formerly seen as expensive and not worthwhile, have now become comparative advantages (win-win approaches) which have given enterprises a distinct advantage over their competitors

Part One: Doing Business in a Turbulent World

2009-12-10T07:38:00.001-08:00

This section of the book focuses mainly on the fact that the way we do business has changed tremendously over the past years. Indeed, globalization can be used by companies for the better of humanity, that is, to make a more equitable society and undo the deterioration of the environment we are to leave for future generations. Because of that, there is a rising need for companies to associate with governments and other stakeholders in order to look for the best means to achieve these objectives.[iii]

The authors note several issues currently affecting free market conditions that are prompting that new rules be created within capitalism, since expectations are rising and new challenges appearing. These issues can be summarized as follows:

the current global economic downturn, and the previous bursting of the dot-com bubble (the crash of dot-com companies after 2001)

* the failure of corporate governance and ethics
* growing geopolitical uncertainty—war against terrorism, international trade tensions and anti-globalization campaigns
* ongoing environmental degradation—global climate change, loss of biodiversity, and water insecurity

These situations are creating new challenges for enterprises, which nowadays are facing new crises (e.g., trust, inequality, and sustainability). Unfortunately, after scandals such as Enron and Andersen, trust has become one of the main concerns for companies searching for long-term positioning in the market. Furthermore, there is now without a doubt a global crisis regarding inequality. According to a survey conducted in 2000, the general trend for options distribution in companies is as follows: 75 percent are top five company executives; 15 percent are the next 50 executives; and 10 percent, all other employees.[iv] Furthermore, sustainability is indeed a central concern not only for companies but for our entire civilization, as humanity’s ecological footprint continues to grow. Therefore, the roles of businesses, as well as governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), have to be adapted to confront these new realities.

Review: Profits with Principles

2009-12-10T07:37:00.004-08:00

Many years have passed since corporate social responsibility (CSR) made its entrance as a major issue for companies. Performance on social and environmental levels has also become important for organizations to consider. Since CSR’s inception, many initiatives have arisen.

Businesses around the world have sought to take account of sustainable development to conform to the general trend across industries toward better management of global regulatory requirements and a reduction of environmental impact. On the other hand, since globalization has become a crucial aspect of organizations economically, organizationally, politically, technologically, and culturally, it has pushed them towards making adjustments in order to incorporate these new requirements into existing processes.

“Business leaders face complex economic challenges, political uncertainty, and changing societal expectations. Regardless of their industry sector, they are under growing pressure to demonstrate outstanding performance in corporate competitiveness, governance, and responsibility.”[i] – Kofi Annan

The book I’ve chosen to review, Profits with Principles: Seven Strategies for Delivering Value with Values, helps clarify the definition of CSR. The volume (which presents more than 60 case studies on corporate social responsibility) follows a pattern of six projected main values, and focuses mainly on how practicing CSR can help organizations accomplish sustainable development—that is, to fulfill the needs of our current generation without compromising those of future ones. It was put together by Ira A. Jackson (a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University) and Jane Nelson (a senior fellow and director of the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and director of Business Leadership and Strategy at the Prince of Wales’ International Business Leaders Forum).[ii]

The book is organized in two sections: “Doing Business in a Turbulent World” and “Putting Principles into Practice.”

Workflow vs. BPM

2009-12-10T07:37:00.003-08:00

Both Workflow and BPM are systematic approaches and technologies to improve a company’s business processes (and performance). From a business perspective, they are ways to make people, information and computers work together more consistently and efficiently to produce needed results.

For example, a workflow/BPM-enabled application could monitor receiving systems for missing or defective items, or walk an employee through the steps to troubleshoot why an order arrived late or not at all.

Both technologies foster ongoing collaboration between information technology (IT) and business users to jointly build applications that effectively integrate people, processes and information. They provide organizations with the ability to define, execute, manage and refine processes that:

* Involve human interaction (such as placing or approving orders);
* Integrate and work with multiple diverse applications; and
* Handle dynamic process rules and changes, not just simple static flows, (i.e., those flows that enable tasks with multiple choices and contingencies/escalations).

The market for workflow and BPM applications is highly stratified and fragmented, in part because the currently available products stem from different origins. Namely, there are former pure integration vendors or document management/enterprise content management (ECM) vendors that have meanwhile encroached into the BPM space.

The difference between workflow tools and BPM suites is largely a semantic distinction, and the gist of the matter is that a workflow engine is at the heart of BPM suites with process execution capabilities. Also, in most cases vendors who sell applications labeled as BPM are aiming at a bigger scope and more complex projects, with elaborate software supporting even more elaborate methodologies, process defintion and modeling, collaboration methods, and so on.

Features and capabilities are not necessarily the only differences between tools, since usually the products aimed at simpler processes focus strongly on “ease of use.” The designers’ assumption is generally that the users are non-IT experts within the company. Such workflow products might be built around the concept of an intelligent form. Basically, the user develops the workflow by filling in a familiar-looking form (e.g., a “tasks vs. actions” matrix), including the business rules.

Yet the limitations of the simpler workflow tools become evident when they attempt to manage inter-process dependencies amongst several applications, handle complex database integration and handle tasks that partake in larger, more complex processes.

Workflow Components

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The individual components that make up workflow are rules and associated actions — tasks, field updates, and alerts.

In general, a workflow rule is the main container for a set of workflow instructions. It includes the criteria for when the workflow should be activated, as well as the particular actions that should take place when the criteria for that rule are met. Every workflow rule must be based on a single object that users will choose when they define the rule, as this object then influences the fields that are available for setting workflow activation criteria.

For example, if a user defines a workflow rule for the “Job Application” object in an HR application, he/she will be able to set workflow activation criteria based on the values of fields like “Job Application Number” and “Status”. Users can also set workflow activation criteria based on standard fields, like “Record Owner” or “Created Date”, as well as fields based on the currently active user when a rule is evaluated, such as their “Role” or “Time Zone”.

When a workflow rule is triggered, there are many types of actions that can occur, starting with a workflow task (or step), which assigns a task to a user according to a particular template. Just as in Microsoft Outlook, tasks include information about something that needs to be done by a certain time, such as making a telephone call, creating an order, shipping goods, or paying an invoice. Typically, assigned tasks appear in a user’s “My Tasks” related list on their home tab (or page) and generate reminder messages that pop up when a user logs in.

When an administrator defines a workflow task, he/she provides default values for data fields like “Assignee”, “Subject”, “Status”, “Priority”, and “Due Date” for tasks that are generated by its associated workflow rule. Administrators can also make sure that a notification email is sent to the assignee when a task is automatically generated.

In additon, a workflow field update changes the value of a particular field on the record that initially triggered the workflow rule, while a workflow alert sends an email according to a specified email template. Unlike workflow tasks, which can only be assigned to users of the application, workflow alerts can be sent to any user or contact, as long as they have a valid email address.

A workflow rule can include any combination of these actions when the rule is triggered. For example, one rule might send out an alert and update two fields on a particular record. The action that one workflow rule takes can also trigger the execution of another workflow rule.

Introducing Workflow Automation

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To that end, a built-in or an external standalone add-on tool (or capability) that can be used to solve the process automation problem is called workflow automation (or workflow management). Some will refer to it as business process management (BPM), and we will shortly try to point out the differences between the two – i.e., workflow and BPM.

Traditional enterprise applications typically feature some built-in functionality, such as a human resource management system (HRMS) or a procurement application, with some capability to tailor the base functionality through parametric configuration options (e.g., via “order types” that entail different mandatory and optional “order steps”) that users have to learn by heart.

To be fair, some enterprise applications have introduced workflow capability into their products to give users some ability to control the process behavior of documents such as an invoice or an engineering specification. But in most enterprise applications workflow is implemented through hard-coding, which means that programmers must develop and maintain the code.

In addition, workflow automation of the typical enterprise application is generally limited to a single document or task routing. This usually means that companies implementing an enterprise application must choose between accepting the vendor’s pre-built business process behavior or paying the vendor dearly to make expensive modifications to accommodate more complex processes, which will then make upgrades either costly or impossible.

In contrast, a specialized workflow tool enhances a single task and/or document routing by providing an integrated capability to include rich user interfaces (UIs), system integration, rule processing and event handling.

Rules are necessary to determine which path users should take next in a process that has multiple possible paths, e.g., an order worth less than US$1,000 does not need manager approval, but over that amount it does. On its part, an example of event handling would be a necessary step after a product recall: a “pull from shelves” notification must be sent throughout the distribution channels.

These capabilities can be pretty powerful, since in general, if users can come up with a standard rule that specifies when a particular event should happen, they can make it happen automatically with workflow. In other words, workflow becomes the magic ingredient that transforms many traditional transactions-capturing applications from a glorified database into fully functional tools that basically everyone in the company should find useful.

It’s About Process (or Ability to be Responsive) – Part I

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After several years (if not decades, even) of painstakingly corralling and setting up all their custom data, objects, tables and whatnot, and making sure that these static and/or dynamic transactional data are secure, many enterprise applications users have realized that the time is long overdue for them to start looking at ways to make their applications more process-savvy.

Companies are increasingly trying to adopt and implement standardized (and yet flexible and easily modifiable) business processes to help their operations run more consistently and smoothly. For example, the chief executive officer (CEO) might decide that as of, say, next month “All customer service cases must be resolved within 24 to 48 hours,” or, “We are going to institute a new sales process for all deals worth over US$100,000.”

However, these business processes often get communicated to employees in an ad hoc and unregulated manner. A process document with instructions may exist on a network file share, but people have not the foggiest idea that it’s there. And some employees might rely on word-of-mouth information from co-workers (so called “tribal knowledge”) to learn the processes for their jobs.

Consequently, standardizing and instituting new business processes can prove challenging for most companies, particularly larger organizations.

Indeed, until recently most enterprise applications have hardly been anything more than glorified databases — they could hold all of the information users may need and allow users to search for records based on various criteria, but they could not really help users to perform the functions of their daily jobs more effectively.

There’s still often no native automation and agility within the system that lets, e.g., a recruiter instantly know when the status of a candidate has changed or when a new position requisition has been entered into the system.

Indeed, when any changes are made somewhere in the organization, users have to remember to notify one another of the change or else rely on others finding the updates on their own. Neither solution is practical in the long term and invites the possibility that the software solution or best practice will not be adopted consistently by all employees at the company.

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

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Robert Frost (1874-1963) was born in San Francisco, California. His father William Frost, a journalist and an ardent Democrat, died when Frost was about eleven years old. His Scottish mother, the former Isabelle Moody, resumed her career as a schoolteacher to support her family. The family lived in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with Frost's paternal grandfather, William Prescott Frost, who gave his grandson a good schooling. In 1892 Frost graduated from a high school and attended Darthmouth College for a few months. Over the next ten years he held a number of jobs. Frost worked among others in a textile mill and taught Latin at his mother's school in Methuen, Massachusetts. In 1894 the New York Independent published Frost's poem 'My Butterfly' and he had five poems privately printed. Frost worked as a teacher and continued to write and publish his poems in magazines. In 1895 he married a former schoolmate, Elinor White; they had six children. From 1897 to 1899 Frost studied at Harvard, but left without receiving a degree. He moved to Derry, New Hampshire, working there as a cobbler, farmer, and teacher at Pinkerton Academy and at the state normal school in Plymouth. When he sent his poems to The Atlantic Monthly they were returned with this note: "We regret that The Atlantic has no place for your vigorous verse." In 1912 Frost sold his farm and took his wife and four young children to England. There he published his first collection of poems, A BOY'S WILL, at the age of 39. It was followed by NORTH BOSTON (1914), which gained international reputation. The collection contains some of Frost's best-known poems: 'Mending Wall,' 'The Death of the Hired Man,' 'Home Burial,' 'A Servant to Servants,' 'After Apple-Picking,' and 'The Wood-Pile.' The poems, written with blank verse or looser free verse of dialogue, were drawn from his own life, recurrent losses, everyday tasks, and his loneliness. While in England Frost was deeply influenced by such English poets as Rupert Brooke. After returning to the US in 1915 with his family, Frost bought a farm near Franconia, New Hampshire. When the editor of The Atlantic Monthly asked for poems, he gave the very ones that had previously been rejected. Frost taught later at Amherst College (1916-38) and Michigan universities. In 1916 he was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. On the same year appeared his third collection of verse, MOUNTAIN INTERVAL, which contained such poems as 'The Road Not Taken,' 'The Oven Bird,' 'Birches,' and 'The Hill Wife.' Frost's poems show deep appreciation of natural world and sensibility about the human aspirations. His images - woods, stars, houses, brooks, - are usually taken from everyday life. With his down-to-earth approach to his subjects, readers found it is easy to follow the poet into deeper truths, without being burdened with pedantry. Often Frost used the rhythms and vocabulary of ordinary speech or even the looser free verse of dialogue. In 1920 Frost purchased a farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, near Middlebury College where he cofounded the Bread Loaf School and Conference of English. His wife died in 1938 and he lost four of his children. Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns, and his son Carol, a frustrated poet and farmer, committed suicide. Frost also suffered from depression and the continual self-doubt led him to cling to the desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. After the death of his wife, Frost became strongly attracted to Kay Morrison, whom he employed as his secretary and adviser. Frost also composed for her one of his finest love poems, 'A Witness Tree.' Frost travelled in 1957 with his future biographer Lawrance Thompson to England and to Israel and Greece in 1961. He participated in the inauguration of President John Kennedy in 1961 by reciting two of his poems. When the sun and the wind prevented him from reading his new poem, 'The Preface', Frost recited his old poem, 'The Gift Outright', from memory. Frost travelled in 1962 in the Soviet Union as a member of a goodwill group. He had a long talk with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, whom he described as "no fathead"; as smart, big and "not a coward." Frost also reported that Khrushchev had said the United States was "too liberal to fight," it caused a considerable stir in Washington. Among the honors and rewards Frost received were tributes from the U.S. Senate (1950), the American Academy of Poets (1953), New York University (1956), and the Huntington Hartford Foundation (1958), the Congressional Gold Medal (1962), the Edward MacDowell Medal (1962). In 1930 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Amherst College appointed him Saimpson Lecturer for Life (1949), and in 1958 he was made poetry consultant for the Library of Congress. At the time of his death on January 29, 1963, Frost was considered a kind of unofficial poet laureate of the US. "I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world," Frost once said. In his poems Frost depicted the fields and farms of his surroundings, observing the details of rural life, which hide universal meaning. His independent, elusive, half humorous view of the world produced such remarks as "I never take my side in a quarrel", or "I'm never serious except when I'm fooling." Although Frost's works were generally praised, the lack of seriousness concerning social and political problems of the 1930s annoyed some more socially orientated critics. Later biographers have created a complex and contradictory portrait of the poet. In Lawrance Thompson's humorless, three-volume official biography (1966-1976) Frost was presented as a misanthrope, anti-intellectual, cruel, and angry man, but in Jay Parini's work (1999) he was again viewed with sympathy: ''He was a loner who liked company; a poet of isolation who sought a mass audience; a rebel who sought to fit in. Although a family man to the core, he frequently felt alienated from his wife and children and withdrew into reveries. While preferring to stay at home, he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings, even though he remained terrified of public speaking to the end..."

Arthur Rimbaud

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When he was not yet 17, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) electrified Paris's literary society with the incendiary poems that later made him the guiding saint of 20th-century rebels, from Pablo Picasso to Jim Morrison. "A Season in Hell," "The Drunken Boat," and the prose poems of Illuminations were epochal works that changed the nature of an art form--and yet their author abandoned poetry at age 21 and spent the rest of his short life as a colonial adventurer in Arabia and Africa. "He was writing in a void," explains British scholar Graham Robb. "In 1876, most of Rimbaud's admirers either were still in the nursery or had yet to be conceived." Hardly surprising, since the poet was a difficult and frequently unpleasant person to actually know. The Parisian poets who took him under their wing soon discovered that Rimbaud was ungrateful, crude, and as scornful of their precious verse as he was of the Catholic Church, bourgeois proprieties, and everything else his disapproving mother held dear. Rimbaud's stormy affair with Paul Verlaine estranged the older poet from his wife and, eventually, from most of his artistic friends as well. In Robb's depiction, the poet possessed from his earliest youth a restless, searching intellect that permitted no compromise with convention nor tenderness for others' weaknesses. The author doesn't soften Rimbaud's "savage cynicism" or gloss over his frequently obnoxious behavior, yet Robb arouses our admiration for "one of the great Romantic imaginations, festering in damp, provincial rooms like an intelligent disease." Like Robb's excellent biographies of Hugo and Balzac, this sharp, subtle, unsentimental portrait is both erudite and beautifully written. - Wendy Smith

John Crowe Ransom (1888 - 1974)

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John Crowe Ransom was born 30 April 1888 in Pulaski, Tenn., the third of five children of Methodist minister John James Ransom and his wife Ella Crowe Ransom. John Crowe attended the Bowen preparatory school in Nashville, completing a rigorous program in classical languages, English, history, mathematics, and German. Entering Vanderbilt University at 15, he continued his classical studies. He was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford, from 1910 to 1912, reading widely in classics and philosophy. In 1914 Ransom accepted an instructorship in English at Vanderbilt, where he immediately began the method of teaching that, through texts written in the late 1930s and early 1940s by his former students Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (the "New Critics"), was to dominate the teaching of literature in American colleges and universities for nearly 30 years: close analysis of individual texts with emphasis on the uses of language. Except for army service during World War I, followed by a term at the University of Grenoble, Ransom remained in the English department at Vanderbilt until 1937 (teaching many summer sessions in other colleges and programs). His first volume of poetry, Poems about God, appeared in 1919. In the fall of 1919 Ransom began meeting with the group that would, in 1922, begin to publish the Fugitive, a magazine whose name signified flight from "the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South" (according to Ransom's foreword). Ransom, an already-published poet and a respected teacher, was sought out for advice and judgment by such younger members of the group as Donald Davidson and Allen Tate (and later Warren, Andrew Lytle, Jesse Wills, and others). The Fugitive, which lasted 19 issues, from 1922 to 1925, and expired not for lack of funds but for want of an editor, published the bulk of Ransom's mature poetry, collected in the volumes Grace after Meat (1924) and Chills and Fever (1924). In 1927 Two Gentlemen in Bonds was published, containing some of Ransom's best poems: "Dead Boy," "Blue Girls," "Janet Waking," "Vision by Sweetwater," "Antique Harvesters," and "The Equilibrists." In God without Thunder (1930) Ransom proposed that new rationalistic theologies were destructive of the religious sense, for they destroyed a person's respect for the mysterious universe and elevated "science," which analyzes and uses "nature" rather than fearing and loving it. Ransom's religious ideas were coordinate with his defense of the South in "Reconstructed but Unregenerate," his essay for I'll Take My Stand (1930), and other essays about the South in contemporary society, such as "The South Defends its Heritage" and "The South—Old or New?" For the former Fugitives and others who published I'll Take My Stand, the respect and love for nature associated with farming, especially family subsistence farming, were intimately bound up with the best social values of the culture—filial piety, kindliness, good manners, respect for the past, contemplativeness, and appreciation not only of the natural world but of art. The publicity focused upon I'll Take My Stand and a series of debates related to it made the agrarian position a focal point for discussion of broad cultural values of American society. In an essay for a 1936 collection, Who Owns America?: A New Declaration of Independence (edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate), Ransom retreated from the extreme agrarian position, acknowledging that the South must accept industrialization in order to preserve economic autonomy. By 1940 Ransom had called the agrarian ideal a "fantasy" in the Kenyon Review, thus making public and final his defection from the economic position he had defended a decade before. The espousal of humane values—including respect for the mysteries—was not recanted but became the center of Ransom's poetic theory in The World’s Body (1938), The New Criticism (1941), and later essays. Ransom accepted a teaching position at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1937 and founded the Kenyon Review two years later. During Ransom's editorship of the Kenyon Review (1939-59), he published important works by such southern writers as Andrew Lytle, Randall Jarrell, Caroline Gordon, and Flannery O'Connor. Although Ransom had left the South and had abandoned the agrarian program, he remained a staunch spokesman for the aesthetic and ethical values formulated in the essays and poems of his Vanderbilt period. He died 2 July 1974 in Gambier, Ohio. Suzanne Ferguson Ohio State University Louis D. Rubin, Jr., in The New Criticism and After, ed. Thomas Daniel Young (1976); John L. Stewart, John Crowe Ransom (1962); Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom (1976).

Mary Darby Robinson (1758 - 1800)

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Born to Mr. and Mrs. John Darby of Bristol, England, Mary Darby Robinson benefited greatly from her father’s membership with the mercantile firm of Miller and Elton. Not only did she enjoy the perks of high society but she was also provided what was considered to be one of the finest educations of the time. She spent her early educational years learning from a minister of a monastery at St. Augustine. Robinson grew to love the arts, dabbling not only in writing and music, but also acting in her later years. Even in her early years she demonstrated a skill in the use of language and flourished in her English classes. Her talent in music earned her a harpsichord and she studied music under Edmund Broadrip. Robinson then attended a famous school, which was run by Hannah More and her sisters in Bristol.
During her childhood, her father John abruptly mortgaged all of his property and then sailed away with his mistress, Elenor, leaving Robinson and the rest of her family behind. His escapade to America failed, and he was forced to return home seven years later. Immediately, he formally separated from his wife and then placed Robinson and her brother John in a school at Chelsea. When Robinson failed from Mrs. Lorrington's school at Chelsea failed, Robinson's mother intervened and enrolled her in her own boarding school, which she opened up with the help of her children. By this time Robinson was fourteen and teaching English prose, poetry, and grammar in Little Chelsea in her mother’s school.
Robinson finished her schooling at Oxford House, the place she developed her love for theatre where she became involved in theater. On a trip to Greenwich she met her future husband, when she stepped out of the carriage at The Star and Garter Inn at Greenwich. Thomas Robinson Esquire greeted her as she exited the carriage, and soon realized he was a neighbor of hers. Shortly after that, Robinson’s brother, George, caught smallpox and Thomas attended to him daily, which gained the approval of Robinson’s mother. By the time George recovered Robinson had fallen ill as well, and received the same care from Thomas that her brother had. Thomas pressed courtship and attended her everyday until Robinson finally agreed. She and Thomas wed in secret when she was fifteen. After Robinson started showing her pregnancy her mother demanded their marriage be announced, and Thomas confessed to his father, who accepted them.

Soon after, they became friends with Lord Lyttleton, an older man who became quite intrested in Robinson. He began to pursue her, and even informed her of her husband’s infidelity with a woman by the name of Harriet Wilmot. Upon questioning, Robinson found this to be true, and became quite distraught. Despite her pain Lyttleton continued to try to seduce Robinson, but she refused. She was later rumored to have had a fifteen-year love affair with Lord Banastre Tarleton. The death of his mother in 1797 catalyzed him to end his 15-year relationship with Mary. Within a year, he met and married a young heiress, Susan Priscilla Bertie. Mary Robinson revenged herself as best she could by writing a savage characterization of Tarleton in The False Friend. The Natural Daughter was an attempt to remind readers of an old scandal concerning Tarleton's young wife: Susan Bertie was an illegitimate child of the Duke of Ancaster. Shortly after the affair she was nearly raped by George Robert Fitzgerald, a murderer who was later hanged by the Kings Officers. Thomas fell into debt and the couple was forced to move in with Thomas’ father, who was now much less welcoming. Robinson soon tired of constant taunting and insults and fled to the Treveca House on November 18, 1774. Here she bore her daughter, whom she christened Maria Elizabeth. Later Thomas was discovered and the couple relocated to Robinson’s grandmother’s home in Mommouth. Thomas was caught here and forced into custody. After his release the family retired at Hafton Garden, where Robinson lived the rest of her life.
In her final writings Robinson sought to describe and justify her life. She expressed her disillusionment with marriage in a work of social criticism, entitled A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination which she wrote in 1799. She first published the work under the name of Anne Frances Randall, and it reflected the thinking of her friends Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Mary argued for the choice of a wife to leave her husband. Robinson also began to write her autobiography. However, her health became increasingly poor, and she died on December 26, 1800, leaving it unfinished. Her daughter Maria Elizabeth edited and published her memoirs (Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself, With Some Posthumous Pieces) in 1801 and a collected edition of her Poetical Works in 1806.