Roughly 80 years ago, Christian novelist Jan Karon, creator of the beloved 15-volume Mitford Years series, stood in front of a mirror and told herself she would be a writer.
Roughly five years ago, the New York Times best-selling author contemplated suicide.
Karon, whose books have sold tens of millions of copies, has lived a life as rich and varied as the characters in her stories. Tomorrow she turns 89.
Although Karon is adamant that she writes for a secular audience, her books bear a decidedly religious outlook. “So many people don’t know that God loves them,” she told CBS in 2005. “[But] he made us and that makes us pretty interesting to him.”
Karon’s central protagonist in the Mitford Years series is Father Tim Kavanagh, an Episcopal priest in a rural mountain town in the American South. A lifelong bachelor, he rebuffs romantic overtures, takes in a loveable but neglected boy, wins the affection of an oversize stray dog, and marries at age 62, all while providing a bit of hope—and laughter—to scores of neighbors in need of community.
Readers have found the same comfort in the books, longing to live in a place like Mitford.
Like Father Tim’s marriage, Karon’s literary career began later in life. She published her first book, At Home in Mitford, at age 57. But her spiritual story began 14 years earlier when she gave her life to Jesus. She detailed this journey in a letter to her acquaintence Jo, stored today with her papers at the University of Virginia archives. Karon invited Jo to also follow Christ, adding that she hoped she had not offended her in any way.
This typical gentle spirit comes through in Karon’s reassuring words to Jo, which in describing conversion may also describe the two halves of Karon’s life. “In abandoning what we were, we begin to find out who we are,” she wrote. “And who we are is, well, it’s a whole lot of what we were.”
Young Karon had it rough. Janice Meredith Wilson was born on March 14, 1937, in the Blue Ridge foothills of North Carolina. At age 3 she saw her parents divorce, and she went to live with her maternal grandparents. A self-described anxious and quiet nail biter, Karon would sit on the porch churning butter as “Mama” told stories. She slept on a bed made from furniture-mill scraps, where she would read a copy of Robert Frost’s poems bought with the family egg money.
First-grade teacher Nan Downs brought Karon out of her shell by encouraging her to write on the blackboard and clap the erasers. Around age 10, Karon wrote a tale inspired by Gone with the Wind and won the short story contest at school. Two years later, she moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, with her mother, who had by then remarried. But at age 14, she dropped out of school to marry Robert Freeland, eloping to South Carolina, where it was still legal to wed so young. One year later, Karon gave birth to her only child, Candace. And at age 18, after a gun accident left her husband paralyzed, she divorced him and took a receptionist job at an advertising agency in Charlotte.
Bored of answering the phone, she started proposing ad copy. With a developing career, in her early 20s Karon married Bill Orth, a Unitarian chemist active in theater circles. She further nurtured her love of the creative arts, and in the early 1960s she launched “the South’s only independent literary quarterly,” Response, which won the praise of Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes.
Race issues became important to Karon. At age 23, she joined one of Charlotte’s first civil rights protests, marching against segregated lunch counters. She fondly recalls holding placards next to two “Southern sisters” in their 80s, decked out in their hats, gloves, and pearl necklaces. Angry men shouted, spat, and threw lit matches as they walked by. But by the late 1960s, she and Orth divorced, and Karon married and obtained her now-famous last name from Arthur Karon, a clothing salesman.
Arthur moved the family to Berkeley, California, but they divorced three years later. Describing the city as “often in a state of civil warfare” due to the protest movements, Karon told Jo she felt her life was “breaking into fragments, coming apart in oddly-shaped pieces.” She longed for the familiarities of home, like Hickman’s Drug Store’s five-cent ice cream and fancy hats at church on Sunday. Yet she hated her past and its “death centered” Christianity. Her grandparents, she complained, kept an Old Testament household.
“It was all locusts, fleas, and floods,” Karon told CT. “Pick your nose and go to hell.”
Only later did she learn the lesson that “nothing pushed on us can soften the heart. … [That] only comes from being loved.”
In 1970, Karon, who by then was thrice divorced, brought Candace back to Charlotte, where she resumed her advertising career.. Though Karon recalled the comforting image of Jesus holding a lamb, she dabbled in Eastern religions. Still discontented, she took a six-week road trip to New England in a rundown Volkswagen bus before settling down in an old farmhouse deep in the North Carolina countryside.
Living on subsistence wages as she did freelance advertising work, Karon called the next two years a “healing process”—both the most trying and the most nourishing time in her life. Contemplating azaleas blooming from the earthen-red clay, she began to pray.
Karon’s fledgling faith survived a 1974 move away from quiet farm life as she occasionally attended a “liberal” church and prayed from time to time, she wrote to Jo. Her career improved steadily, but five years later at age 42, Karon lost her job as a TV producer. A turning point came in May 1980, when for the first time she fell to her knees to pray.
“I don’t know what to pray for,” Karon told God. “I’m just here, and I need help and just change me.” She asked God simply to be gentle with her.
Nothing happened. Perhaps that was the answer she needed. There was no clap of thunder, no angels at her bedside, she said. If anything, she was afraid God would send her to Africa as a missionary. But slowly, everything changed. Little by little, Karon said, she learned that God loved her—and even more slowly, that God also forgave her.
Life carried on, only more successfully. In 1987, Karon and a colleague won the advertising industry’s top Steven E. Kelly Award for their ad and split a $100,000 prize. A year later she quit her job, traded her Mercedes for a used Toyota, and moved back to the country in hope of becoming a writer.
The idea for Father Tim came in a vision of sorts as Mitford unfolded in her mind. Aware that a Baptist preacher conjured too many negative literary stereotypes, Karon crafted him as an Episcopalian, she said. His life began as a weekly serial publication in the local Blowing Rocket newspaper of Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Karon drew the illustrations. They paid her with a free copy of the 10-cent paper.
Circulation surged. But despite the local acclaim, Karon struggled through 11 publishing house rejections before Lion, a small Christian press, accepted At Home in Mitford. Two novels followed, as she used all her marketing skills to self-promote the books. But there was no national market for wholesome stories of simple characters, let alone with a Christian theme, Karon told World magazine. People preferred Stephen King.
“I don’t give you much of a ride. I just give you sort of a float!” Karon stated. “A lot of people tell me that my books put them to sleep, and I consider that a huge compliment.”
Her breakthrough came through well-connected word of mouth. Karon’s friend shared the first Mitford book with the owner of a bookstore in Raleigh. The owner then passed it on to a New York agent, who put it before an editor at Viking Penguin—who happened to be the daughter of a Lutheran minister. In 1996, the publisher purchased all three titles.
By the end of the decade, Karon was a best-selling author.
In 2000, Karon moved to a historic farm near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate in Virginia. More novels followed, including A Common Life, a retrospective look at Father Tim’s wedding adventure; In This Mountain, where the now-retired cleric watches his adopted son become a veterinarian; and Shepherds Abiding, a Christmas quest to restore a derelict Nativity scene.
Karon even wrote a Mitford-themed cookbook.
But some controversy came with the 2007 publication of Home to Holly Springs. After receiving a cryptic unsigned letter asking Father Tim to return to the Mississippi hometown he has long left behind, the priest discovers he has a long-lost Black half brother.
The Virginia archive reveals some readers were grateful the nonpolitical Mitford series now confronted racism. Others were offended. Karon chaffed at the notion that this was a new turn in her writing. Over the course of the novels, Miss Sadie, an elderly member of Father Tim’s congregation, develops a warm relationship with her Black niece Louella, who moved from the city to be her caretaker.
Yet Karon was deliberate with the Holly Springs story line. It is common in the South to have unknown siblings and unacknowledged interracial extended family, she said, though the issue is never talked about. And since Father Tim from earlier stories lamented being an only child, she decided to fix that.
“I gave him a brother,” Karon said, “and the reader a look at brotherhood.”
Karon’s work is celebrated by Christians and non-Christians alike—and suitably adapted by both audiences. In 2003, Focus on the Family produced At Home in Mitford as a radio drama. Fourteen years later, The Hallmark Channel produced it as a made-for-TV rom-com.
Karon’s publishing pace has since slowed amid a family tragedy. She published her 14th Mitford book in 2017, followed by a Father Tim compendium of spiritual nuggets the year after. But in 2021, her daughter died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 68, throwing the author into despair. She told CT she lost her desire to live, contemplating suicide, as Candace was the “sunshine” in her life.
Some preached sermons at her—Aren’t you a Christian?—as Karon struggled with depression, she said. But she went to God on her knees, honest about her faults and mistakes. And then, she threw herself into a different kind of storytelling.
That year, Karon founded The Mitford Museum and housed it in her former North Carolina elementary school. Its first gallery is her first-grade classroom, returning full circle to Nan Downs and the influence she had on a frightened country girl. Currently the project is constructing the Mitford Discovery Center, a hands-on workshop and art space meant to help others uncover the hidden gifts they have to offer the world.
“To be seen is marvelous,” Karon said.
And last October, she published her 15th Mitford novel, My Beloved, resurrecting an unfinished short story she rediscovered while navigating her grief. It’s a whimsical tale, and Karon said that remembering Candace gave it a depth that goes beyond the surface-level laughter. She is now researching for a new book about 16th-century Italy following a monthlong visit to the country.
Perhaps Karon’s journey has been more adventurous than those of her village-settled characters. But as she told Jo, who she is now, after following Jesus, retains a whole lot of what she was before. From falling apart in Berkeley to finding a new story in Rome, from joining protest marches to writing about interracial families, from discovering God’s love to illustrating it for others through Father Tim, Jan Karon has been a witness to millions.
“This is life,” she said, “and it taught me how to write books.”
Additional reporting by Harvest Prude.
