Jane van Meter was born in Denver, Colorado in 1906. She went to Smith College, the University of Colorado, and the Sorbonne in France, where she studied music. Fluent in several languages, according to her obituary, van Meter earned a master’s degree in Classics and Romance Languages.

In 1932 van Meter became the personal assistant to Sylvia Beach and the summer manager of Beach’s bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Company. The bookstore and lending library was known for being a hub of the expatriate modernist literary movement in the interwar years and for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Though van Meter returned to the United States in 1936, she maintained regular correspondence with Beach, sending her goods throughout World War II and after.

Jane van Meter married Shakespeare scholar Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman (1911-1977) in 1936. They had one child, Barbara “Suki” van Meter Hinman (1948-2002). Charlton Hinman studied at Oxford and in the 1940s created the Hinman collator, an optical device for comparing different copies of the same edition of the folios of William Shakespeare, which he used in his research.

During World War II the couple worked in intelligence and communications for the Navy and the Marines. They lived in Columbia, Missouri (1938-1940); Washington, D.C. (1940-1941); Cherry Point, North Carolina (1941-1945); Baltimore, Maryland (1946-1950) and Pine Crest, Virginia (1950-1960) before settling in Lawrence, Kansas, where Charlton Hinman taught at the University of Kansas.

The couple divorced in 1966, but Jane van Meter remained prominent on the University of Kansas campus, attending classes, lectures, and movies. She became known as “The Blue Lady” on account of the powder blue outfit that she invariably wore. Throughout her life van Meter befriended scholars, artists, and writers.

Jane van Meter died at Lawrence Presbyterian Manor in 1992.

[Information pulled from collection materials and van Meter’s obituary in the Lawrence Journal World, March 4, 1992.]