ABSTRACT
Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa died within a month of each other in 1983. Sraffa, who was born in August 1898, was five years older than Joan Robinson; they had known one another for over fifty years. Joan Robinson had attended Sraffa’s lectures in Cambridge in the late 1920s and they were colleagues in the Faculty of Economics and Politics from 1933 on, when Joan Robinson was appointed to an assistant lectureship. Sraffa himself had been appointed to a teaching post in 1927 but, as Austin Robinson (1977: 29) recalls, in 1930 he begged to be taken off teaching. He retained the post of Marshall Librarian and, soon after resigning his lectureship, the post of mentor to the research students was created for him. This allowed him to work on the Ricardo volumes and it relieved him of the anxieties which teaching, especially the critical destruction of the arguments of people whose work he admired (Marshall, for example), caused him.
