The Other Ocampo Sister, Overshadowed No More

Silvina Ocampo.

Silvina Ocampo was the youngest of six sisters who grew up in Argentina when it was one of the richest countries in the world, and when the Ocampo family was one of the richest families in Argentina.

Silvina was part of a magical circle whose nucleus was formed by Jorge Luis Borges and, among others, the younger man who would become her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Each member of this circle created his or her own works, and also worked in collaboration. While each writer had his or her own style, as the Sur group—around the important journal , founded by Silvina’s eldest sister, Victoria, in consultation with the New York writer Waldo Frank—they shaped a literary cultural identity and a new literary genre. In their collaborative work, the trio of Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Adolfo. In 1940, Borges, Bioy, and Silvina published a famous anthology of fantastic literature, and when Bioy and Borges wrote together, the writer they created had various pseudonyms (taken from the names of their ancestors) like “Bustos Domecq” or “Benito Suarez Lynch.” Silvina contributed to those literary ventures and inventions as well, but she didn’t sign on as an official contributor, perhaps because her collaboration was exclusively oral.