ABSTRACT
Joan Robinson was the daughter of a famous major-general, Sir Frederick Maurice, and the descendant of two distinguished Cambridge scholars. Her great grandfather was F. D. Maurice, the Christian socialist who was a formidable intellectual influence on English nineteenth-century academics, and her grandfather Frederick Marsh was professor of surgery and Master of Downing College, Cambridge. She went from St. Paul's, the leading London girls' public school, to Girton College in 1922 to read for the Economics Tripos at a time when the Cambridge School, inspired by Alfred Marshall, was enjoying an unsurpassed international reputation. As a woman, she was not a full member of the University and was not admitted until 1948 to the degree she had earned in 1925. This quaint circumstance in no way impeded her rapid acceptance as an equal into an outstanding economic community that by the later 1920s included among its stars J. M. Keynes, A. C. Pigou, D. H. Robertson, E. A. G. Robinson (whom she married in 1926), and P. Sraffa, and that was already attracting a dazzling stream of talented visitors from the world's leading universities. She became assistant lecturer in economics in 1931, lecturer in 1937, reader in 1949, and professor in 1965. From the early 1950s up to the illness that led to her death in 1983 she was the Cambridge School's most charismatic teacher of students (especially keen graduate students) and its most devastating critic of economic orthodoxy in all its forms—whether neoclassical or Marxist or "bastard Keynesian" (to use her own term for those who reconstructed the Keynesian revolution in the post-World War II era).
