Free Women in the Pampas
A Novel about Victoria Ocampo
A biographical novel about an Argentine woman’s coming of age as a writer and internationally influential intellectual.
Description
A feminist pioneer, writer, and patron of the arts and literature in Buenos Aires, Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979) was a larger-than-life personality of legendary vitality. A key protagonist in Argentina’s rise to world-class status in the arts and sciences, Ocampo leveraged her wealth and social status to found Sur (1931–92), the internationally influential journal of literature, culture, and ideas.
Ocampo personally invited many intellectual and artistic celebrities to visit Buenos Aires. Most were men. Some, endowed with egos as outsized as their reputations, tripped and fell into sentimental imbroglios with the strong-willed and beautiful Ocampo. In Free Women in the Pampas the ups and downs of her passionate friendships, debates, and misunderstandings with poet Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and the writers Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, Hermann von Keyserling, and Waldo Frank are witnessed by the fictional Carmen Brey, a Galician-Spanish immigrant whose story is skilfully interwoven with that of Ocampo. Carmen’s sympathetic but incisive gaze puts her friend Victoria into perspective against a larger vision of Argentina. Carmen’s adventures lead her to social-justice writer María Rosa Oliver, the wilder side of the 1920s literary avant-garde (and the now-canonical authors Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, and Leopoldo Marechal), the Mapuche people of the pampa, and a ten-year-old Evita Ibarguren, later famous as Eva Perón.
Against this broad, inclusive backdrop, the novel vividly depicts Victoria Ocampo’s struggle with the strictures of class and gender to find her own voice and vocation as a public intellectual.
Reviews
“We are fortunate that Lojo’s work as a poet, novelist, and scholar is gaining a greater foothold in the English-speaking world. Free Women in the Pampas explores a pivotal moment connecting the women writers of Mansilla’s day, who considered themselves co-founders of the national literary tradition, with the immense flowering of women writers in the latter half of the 20th century. Above all, however, it is a pleasure to read. Cheadle’s accessible translation is designed to be read without scholarly accoutrements, though it does come equipped with an excellent introduction, incisive endnotes, a glossary of Spanish words, and period photographs of its principle actors. The book should help make both Lojo and Ocampo more familiar, which can only enrich anglophone cultures.” Dalhousie Review
"Free Women in the Pampas will be fundamental to the dissemination of two important Argentine writers, María Rosa Lojo and Victoria Ocampo. A riveting piece of fiction, it also sheds light on a key period in Argentine intellectual history." Odile Cisneros, University of Alberta and co-author of Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater