Love Comes Softly

About the Love Comes Softly series

Love Comes Softly is the series that launched Janette Oke's career and, with it, the modern inspirational prairie-romance genre. It opens with young widow Marty Davis, stranded and pregnant on the 1860s American frontier after her husband dies in a wagon accident, entering a marriage of convenience with widowed farmer Clark Davis so that each can survive a winter neither could face alone. What begins as a practical arrangement becomes, over the following volumes, a lifelong love story, and the series widens outward from Marty and Clark to their children and grandchildren as the settlement around them grows into a true community.

Across its eight books, the series follows three generations of the same family through courtship, marriage, child-rearing, loss, and faith, always against the backdrop of the practical, physically demanding work of homesteading. Oke wrote the books with a gentleness that avoids melodrama even while covering real hardship -- death, hard winters, and the slow work of building trust -- and the series' commercial success (millions of copies sold, and a long-running Hallmark Channel film franchise loosely adapted from it) established the template Oke and many later inspirational novelists would return to.