 However, The Ego and Its Own was neither a popular nor a financial success. Stirner had left his teaching post shortly before the book was published, and, by 1846, was reduced to advertising in the Vossische Zeitung for a loan. Stirner had squandered much of his second wife’s inheritance, and Marie Dähnhardt left him towards the end of the same year. Many years later she was traced to England by Stirner’s loyal biographer, the poet and novelist John Henry Mackay (1864–1933). She refused to meet Mackay in person but wrote to him portraying Stirner as a very sly man whom she had neither respected nor loved, and describing their relationship together as more of a cohabitation than a marriage.