And it wasn’t until she was 48 that Jan saw fit to leave the security of her attractive advertising job to pursue her writing career in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Jan actually wrote her first book at the tender age of ten her life and choices, however, guided her towards advertising. Janice Meredith Wilson was born in the foothills of North Carolina in 1937 the American author was named after Janice Meredith, a popular novel by Paul Leicester Ford. While often read by a wide variety of persons, The Mitford Years series is, on a whole, geared towards female readers. Jan Karon’s other series, ‘The Father Tim Series’, also strives to advance the adventures of characters already introduced with The Mitford years. Numerous other works such a ‘Shepherd’s abiding’ and ‘A Common Life’ tell stories centered on the town of Mitford and even utilize some similar characters. While The Mitford Years series officially ends with the seventh book, the story doesn’t quite come to a close with this final novel. There are seven novels in the series, this not including Jan’s companion works to The Mitford years such as cook books.

The Mitford years officially begins with ‘At Home in Mitford’ published in 1994, the novel introduces the original players and the lives they lead, continuing to add and subtract characters as the series progresses, finally ending with ‘Somewhere Safe with Somebody good’, the last novel in the series, published in 2014.īeing Christian themed, The Mitford years presents what many have referred to as a light offering of theology, scattering the story with Bible themes in as organic a manner as possible, but typically avoiding a heavy handed and preachy approach, Jan Karon instead allowing the story to drive the means with which the different themes are introduced.

The stories will often seek to engage readers in terms of the personal intricacies of the different characters, not only presenting their flaws and struggles but daily routines, pets, what they tend to have for lunch and so on and so forth, with the aim of generating a lively and wholesome image of each character. Jan Karon is described as introducing the town as its owner character, a place many readers look forward to visiting in each novel. The books are fictional in nature and Christian themed, often placing special emphasis upon the little town of Mitford within which its stories take place. The Mitford Years is a series of books from American Novelist Jan Karon set in Mitford, a fictional town in North Carolina, the novels centre on the character of Father Tim.

At home at mitford series