Introduction

Until Emecé began re-publishing her works in the late 1990s, the Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo was a relatively well kept secret. Her eldest sister Victoria had a more prominent cultural profile through her influential literary journal and publishing house, Sur (see King, 1986). The inevitable comparison between them was begun by Victoria herself, who published Silvina's first book, Viaje olvidado [Forgotten Journey] (1937), then proceeded to pen a rather censorious review of it (Victoria Ocampo, 1937). Silvina Ocampo naturally shrank from the limelight – Ulla (1999) dubs her ‘una escritora oculta’ [a hidden writer] – and from the literary celebrity which gradually accrued not only to Victoria but also to Silvina's husband Adolfo Bioy Casares and particularly to her close friend Jorge Luis Borges. This hiding and masking of herself (Victoria's review described her as ‘una persona disfrazada de sí misma’ [a person disguised as herself] (1937: 119) allowed Ocampo the freedom to carve out an increasingly idiosyncratic literary niche which continues to defy satisfactory classification, perhaps explaining why she has tended to remain marginal in histories of Latin American literature.