ABSTRACT
Jane Hoyake is unknown to history, except for her diaries. They span the years from 1939 to 1945, when Hoyake is living in Germanoccupied Amsterdam. The diaries are a gappy and “intimate history” of a Dutch-born peripatetic cosmopolitan, and of a city at war. Hoyake’s writing exemplifies the diary’s “poetic,” including its spontaneous, extempore, private, writing as exercise and fragmentary modes. She also typifies the work of the gap hypothesis. This critical stance was prompted by thousands of unpublished diaries. More recently, published diarists—including Wittgenstein and Sontag—have further enriched its framework. It asserts that much study and life is a matter of trying to educate one’s guesses about the unknown. Contrariwise, the least fragment can be rewarding if tantalizing.
