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 felt like she lost her “reason to live.”
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…
This article originally published at Christianity Today on March 13, 2026. Please click here to read the full text.
Jayson Casper 