The Woman Who Was Everything

by Craig Stephenson • directed by Richard Rose

With Michelle Giroux, John Cleland & Tom McCamus

Janet Malcolm observed that books of letters convey more and give a stronger sense of immediacy than biographies. What can be more thrilling than reading an intense correspondence, as if over the shoulders of the letter-writers?

The Argentinian Victoria Ocampo was perhaps the foremost Spanish-speaking cultural figure of her time, building bridges between continents and leading the way for 20th-century feminism in South America. The Baltic German Count Hermann von Keyserling, now almost forgotten, was a popular philosopher and founder of a School of Wisdom where Hermann Hesse and Rabindranath Tagore lectured. Carl Gustav Jung was a renowned Swiss psychiatrist, creator of the Zurich school of psychoanalysis. Ocampo and Keyserling met in 1929. Ocampo and Jung met in 1934. The correspondence that preceded and followed these meetings, much of it translated from the French, German and Spanish for the first time, illuminates an essential story of three great minds of the first half of the 20th century.

Ocampo and Keyserling’s relationship was fraught with misunderstandings. Jung described it as “one of the most beautiful animus-anima stories I have ever heard”. Keyserling stressed: “It is possible to experience… in the encounter and collision with one woman, the whole history of Creation.” Only after Keyserling’s widow published a chapter entitled “V.O.” in his posthumous memoirs, did Ocampo decide to make public her version of the events, as if “in a dialogue beyond the grave”.

Michelle Giroux, John Cleland and Tom McCamus bring the letters to life in a performance directed by Richard Rose.