Love Comes Softly

Love Comes Softly is a historical romance by the Canadian writer Janette Oke, published in 1979. It is the first book of a series about the Davis family.

The novel opens on the prairie, where Marty Claridge's husband is killed in a horse accident and leaves her alone in a place she has only just arrived in. Clark Davis needs somebody to look after his small daughter, Missie, and the two of them marry for practical reasons rather than for love, with the arrangement understood between them as a working one. Over the months that follow, Marty comes to care for the child and then for the man she has married, and the household settles into something neither of them originally intended. The question the book returns to is what happens when the wagon train comes back in the spring: Marty has the option of going home, and by then she has a reason to stay. The story is told within the conventions of Christian fiction, in which the characters' faith is part of how they make their decisions.

Oke wrote a long series of novels set on the western frontier, and this was the book that began it.