Collectively, Oke’s books have sold more than 30 million copies. Love Comes Softly has gone on to sell more than one million copies on its own. The publisher is now known as Bethany House, and Love Comes Softly was the first fictional title they published. Her debut novel, Love Comes Softly, was then published in 1979. The manuscript was first rejected, but after six months of research Oke sent out query letters and received an invitation to submit a manuscript from Bethany Fellowship Inc. Her intention was to write a clean and entertaining story that embodied her faith through lasting values, real life, and honest love. By this point her children were teenagers, so Oke wrote in the morning, during lunch breaks, and in the car. It was in the summer of 1977 that she began to draft her first novel whenever she had a spare moment. However, she graduated from Mountain View Bible College in 1957 that same year, she married her husband, Edward Oke. As a teenager Oke had to drop out of high school and get a job at a local bank after an illness in her family. She always had a large interest in reading and writing, but never had enough time to dedicate to the interest.

Her upbringing in the Canadian Prairies and her faith of Evangelical Christianity forms a large part of her novels. Oke was born in Champion, Alberta during the Great Depression to Canadian pioneers. The bestselling author of the Love Comes Softly series, Janette Oke has written more than 75 novels during her career as an author, which has spanned more than 40 years. Keep reading to find out how you should read the Love Comes Softly series in order. Her faith was paramount when she began writing these historical romances and is what she credits for her success. Reading the Love Comes Softly series in order will introduce you to three generations of pioneers as they navigate life on the land and love.Īn Evangelical Christian, Oke’s faith plays a large part in her books which she describes as being about lasting values, real life, and honest love. A Canadian pioneer herself, Janette Oke portrays life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the Prairies in an incredibly realistic fashion with her debut series.

Love comes softly book series