 Although she was very much encouraged by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, she received little support from fellow intellectuals in her lifetime. Even Godwin did not take to her on their first meeting. Relatively few of the foremost women writers gave Wollstonecraft their wholehearted support in the eighteenth century. She received some encouragement for her first publications from Catharine Macaulay, but the latter unfortunately died in 1791, before Wollstonecraft’s career reached its peak. Some mocked her, but rarely were her ideas genuinely assessed in the way they have come to be since the second half of the twentieth century. The leading poet, Anna Barbauld (1743–1825) was one of the few members of the radical intelligentsia of the time whose opposition to Wollstonecraft was the product of a real engagement with her views on women. By the end of the 1790s and for most of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft was derided by many, if only because of what was deemed to have been a scandalous personal life. There were, to be sure, important exceptions, especially in America (Botting and Carey 2004). But such praise as she did receive on both sides of the Atlantic came from arguably limited acquaintance with her ideas or her intellectual persona.