Victoria Ocampo (1890 – 1979), entrepreneur and writer, founded the magazine and publishing house Sur in 1931. She published great Argentine authors and translated works, including: Julio Cortázar, Ortega y Gasset, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, Indira Gandhi, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Octavio Paz, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley. For her extensive research, study, and bridging of Latin American and European culture, she is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century literary life. Her intellectual curiosity was constantly accompanied by her fight against gender stereotypes; she was the first Argentine woman to obtain a driver’s license and to enter the Argentine Academy of Letters in 1977. She founded one of Argentina’s earliest feminist movements, the Union de Mujeres (Women’s Union). She wrote a vast number of articles and maintained friendships and correspondence with the intellectuals of her time. Among her essays, notable ones focus on Emily Brontë, Lawrence of Arabia, and Virginia Woolf. Some of her writings and reflections on the cultural life of her era are collected in the ten volumes of Testimonios (Testimonies). Her six-volume Autobiography was published posthumously.
