On October 8, 1933, Joan Robinson published The Economics of Imperfect Competition, her first major theoretical work, which appeared simultaneously with Edward Chamberlin's Theory of Monopolistic Competition — two economists reaching similar conclusions independently. Robinson was thirty years old and a lecturer at Cambridge, a title that carried less pay and institutional standing than the reader position her male counterparts held.

Robinson was born in 1903 in Camberley, Surrey, and studied at Girton College, Cambridge. She became one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, a central figure in Keynesian economics and a fierce critic of neoclassical theory, and spent her entire career at Cambridge. She was never made a full professor.

Her work ranged from imperfect competition theory to the Cambridge Capital Controversy — a sustained critique of neoclassical capital theory that engaged Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow directly and was never fully resolved — to development economics and growth theory. Her book The Accumulation of Capital (1956) was a major theoretical work. She studied and wrote about economic development in Asia, visiting China and North Korea and writing about them in terms that Western economics found ideologically inconvenient.

She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics multiple times. She never received it.

She became a full professor at Cambridge in 1965, at sixty-two, after forty years of influential work.