Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo: The Art of Combining Modernism and Non-Confining Domesticity

Abstract

For Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo the houses they lived in—apart from being lived spaces or spaces of memory—were the seat of their work projects and established fields of sociability which gathered not only family and friends but also relevant personalities and artists related to their professional activity. In the case of Virginia Woolf, her home became the headquarters of the Hogarth Press, the publishing house which she founded together with her husband, Leonard Woolf; and the houses of Victoria Ocampo were the seat of her magazine and publisher Sur. In both writers' texts great importance is given to space; they reveal the socio-political nature in the spatial dimension. Victoria Ocampo was also concerned with urban issues and she became a defender of modern architecture. Under the influence of modernism, both Woolf and Ocampo created innovating domestic conditions in line with the new feminine roles that emerged in the first decades of the 20th century.