Victoria Ocampo

Victoria Ocampo CBE (April 7, 1890 – January 27, 1979) was an Argentine writer and intellectual, described by Jorge Luis Borges as La mujer más argentina ("The quintessential Argentine woman"). Best known as an advocate for others and as publisher of the legendary literary magazine Sur, she was also a writer and critic in her own right and one of the most prominent South American women of her time. Her sister, Silvina Ocampo, a writer also, was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Biography

Born Ramona Victoria Epifanía Rufina Ocampo in Buenos Aires into a high-class society family, she was educated at home by a French governess. She would later write, "the alphabet-book in which I learned to read was French, as was the hand that taught me to draw those first letters."

She is sometimes said to have attended the Sorbonne: on page 39 of her biography of Ocampo, Doris Meyer states that, during the family's 1906–1907 trip to Paris, the same during which she was etched by Paul César Helleu, the Ocampos allowed 17-year-old Victoria, "well-chaperoned", to audit some lectures at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France. She remembered particularly enjoying Henri Bergson's lectures at the latter. She was not, of course, ever matriculated at either; her very old, traditional and rich family frowned on formal education for females, and so Victoria had none.