Dialogues between South America and Europe: Victoria Ocampo Channels Virginia Woolf

This chapter discusses Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo’s exchanges within a modernist transnational framework shaped by alternative forms of female writing and dissemination. Rather than focusing on any cultural asymmetry between the English writer Woolf and the Argentinian author Ocampo, the analysis highlights the two women’s similar concerns and ideals regarding the female universe, and more specifically women writers. Their shared outlook constituted a powerful empathetic catalyst that allowed them to surpass any cultural and interpersonal distance and thus to satisfy their intellectual hunger. The presence of loans and inheritances – both imaginary and real – in Woolf and Ocampo’s interaction is analysed partly in the light of the global novel and located on a borderless spectrum of women’s writing. More specifically, Ocampo’s inter-textual dialogues with Woolf – such as those in her ‘Carta a Virginia Woolf’ (1934), which includes references to A Room of One’s Own (1929) – are read as a typically female form of dissemination, partly aimed at interrupting an otherwise male monologue. The two women’s face-to-face encounters – and recollections of them – are also pondered. Special attention is paid to their first meeting, when Woolf and Ocampo sealed a female intellectual pact against fascism as an overt manifestation of male tyranny.