In 1930 Victoria was introduced by Waldo Frank to Eduardo Mallea, then a contributor to the Argentine daily La Nación and the translator of Frank’s work into Spanish. Mallea would later become editor-in-chief of Sur, the president of the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE), and Argentina’s representative to the European Bureau of the United Nations as plenipotentiary delegate.

Though often accused of being excessively ‘europhilic,’ Mallea was engaged by the exploration of that complex and multiform reality, composed of various races and origins, hidden below the seemingly uniform Argentina surface. As Newton Freitas writes in Ensayos Americanos: “Mallea is, because of this very tendency, the most representative of the Argentine intellectuals of our generation. The one who best sums up the splendors, the merits, the small social incoherencies present in the formation of the country… In spite of his universalist baggage, he is fundamentally Argentine.”

In Testimonios sobre Victoria Ocampo Mallea writes: “the foremost of Victoria’s sure attributes is her authenticity.”