Against Borges - Four Women Writers of his Inner Circles

Situates the work of four women writers who were part of Borges’s circle in the history of women’s writing generally, drawing on feminist theory from Europe and North America as well as from Latin American perspectives.

Against Borges examines four women writers—Norah Lange, Silvina Ocampo, Estela Canto, and Silvina Bullrich—who are not often considered together, but who each had their literary start within the close-knit circles dominated by Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires’s mid-twentieth century. The title plays with the double meaning of the word “against,” signifying opposed or resistant, but also touching or supported by. In each case, the writers benefited from early support by Borges, but eventually found their own voices, different from his and also from each other’s. These writers struggled as much as their nineteenth-century counterparts to find ways to represent in fiction a particularly feminine subjectivity. This study acknowledges their similarities and also highlights their originality. More importantly, it seeks to undo some of the misperceptions about them that persist to the present day, especially regarding their paths through the fraught politics of Argentina’s twentieth century.