In 1934, Argentinian editor and writer Victoria Ocampo commissioned Jorge Luis Borges the translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, to be published in 1935 and 1937, respectively, under the auspices of the intellectual circle ‘Sur’ (‘South’). These translations would inspire generations of writers, appealed by Woolf’s subversive strategies to trespass physical and psychological boundaries, and by her innovative conception of time, history, and gender, which anticipated what came to be later known as ‘magic realism’. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf’s influence affects the construction of alternative ontological realms that both coexist with and transcend identifiable historical sites in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, and Jeanette Winterson. The chapter further examines the different strategies these writers use to unsettle received assumptions pertaining to history and to propose alternative rewritings of it in Woolf’s wake.
