Victoria Ocampo, una “empedernida escribidora de cartas”

Abstract

In 1971, Victoria Ocampo defines herself as "an inveterate letter-writer" and states: "My Testimonios are letters in disguise, perhaps". From this self-figuration, we will work on the specific authorial use that Ocampo gave to her correspondence as a hybrid space, between the private and the public, to enable her autobiographical writing in a patriarchal intellectual field. In 1931, in issue number one of Sur, she included a personal letter she had sent to Waldo Frank to explain the magazine's project; in 1935, she began the first volume of her Testimonios by recreating her epistolary exchange with Virginia Woolf; later, in her posthumously published Autobiografía, she also includes fragments of letters from different correspondents and some sent to Delfina Bunge, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Count de Keyserling. Finally, at the end of his life, she decided that her more than 4000 letters should be preserved at Harvard University. It will be developed the hypothesis that for Victoria Ocampo her letters were part of her literary work.