Florence Brown's family had latterly produced many congregationalist ministers. Her father John Brown had written the standard biography of John Bunyan and was the preacher at the Bunyan Meeting House in Bedford. From visits to his grandfather's study the young Geoffrey was familiar with Bunyan's chair, staff, and cabinet. Florence had been a student at Newnham Hall and a pupil of Geoffrey's father. She had a wide interest in public and social work, later becoming a justice of the peace, an alderman, and in 1932 mayor of Cambridge.
The chief source for Keynes's life is his absorbing autobiography, The Gates of Memory: No Life Is Long Enough (1981), which he finished at age ninety-three. In it he described his upbringing as conservative, comfortable, and nurturing. The family had the connections and the means to provide Keynes and his siblings with exceptional intellectual and cultural stimulation. His sister Margaret married the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist A. V. Hill. The elder son, John Maynard Keynes, showed an early genius for mathematics that helped to make him one of the most influential economists in history. Geoffrey, following him by several years, later said, "We were not close friends and my view of him was more that of an eminent acquaintance to whom I looked up as a superior and somewhat distant being." As late as 1907, in a letter to a friend, Maynard called Geoffrey "quite hopeless" as interesting company.
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