With Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo compiled the landmark Antología de la literatura fantástica; owing in part to the lasting impact and importance of this anthology, critical reception of her work has often situated her within, or differentiated her from, the genre of fantastic literature. Whilst there are aspects in common between her narrative and that of Borges, Bioy Casares and other later exponents of the fantastic such as Julio Cortázar, my intention here is to investigate further the striking originalities of her style in order to uncover less obvious links between her and the poet, Alejandra Pizarnik. Until comparatively recently, Ocampo's work has been sparsely represented in anthologies, perhaps because with its recurrent themes of childish cruelty and perversity it has a different – and possibly more disturbing – ambiguity to that of many other fantastic short stories. Ocampo's reticence about promoting her own work further contributed to this under-representation, as did the predominance of her elder sister, Victoria Ocampo, founder of the influential Argentine literary journal, Sur. Nélida Salvador, in her overview of Argentinian literature for the Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, lists Silvina Ocampo among those contributors to Sur who ‘marked out incontrovertible aesthetic routes’. Along this aesthetic route I shall trace childhood as both theme and perspective through Ocampo to Pizarnik.

In an issue of the Revista Iberoamericana devoted to women's writing, Sylvia Molloy explores the question of literary precursors, both from a reader's and a writer's point of view. She describes how a reader discovers traces of other writers between the lines of a text; Molloy also investigates how a writer seeks to establish a context for herself, either by naming those writers who have marked her, or more revealingly, those writers whose influence she would like to be apparent from her work.