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The Necklace: a Critical Analysis

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Published: Jan 30, 2024

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Introduction, plot summary, character analysis, theme analysis.

• References:
• De Maupassant, G. (1884). The Necklace. Retrieved from https://www.vobal.com/#/documents/history_of_literturereadersgu/the_necklace
• Rose, N. (2020). Materialism is a Destructive force. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-to-want-what-you-have/202010/materialism-is-destructive-force

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A Summary and Analysis of Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Necklace’ is an 1884 short story by the French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-93), first published in Le Gaulois as ‘La parure’ in February of that year. If you’re unfamiliar with Maupassant’s work, ‘The Necklace’ is his most famous tale, and worth taking the time to read. If you’re a fan of stories with twist endings , you’ll probably love it.

You can read ‘The Necklace’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Maupassant’s story below. The story takes around ten minutes to read.

‘The Necklace’: plot summary

Mathilde Loisel is a pretty woman who is married to a clerk who works in the Ministry of Education. They do not have much money, and Mathilde spends her days fantasising that her life is more glamorous and upmarket than it actually is.

When her husband is invited to a ball hosted by the minister for whom he works, he is keen for them both to attend, but Mathilde tells him she has nothing to wear to such a high-class social occasion. He tells her he will buy her a nice dress, even though it will mean sacrificing his own pleasure.

Then, Mathilde becomes worried that she has no jewels to wear with the dress. Loisel, her husband, suggests she ask her friend, Madame Forestier, if she has something she will lend to Mathilde for the night. Madame Forestier is happy for her friend to borrow whatever she wants, and Mathilde chooses a diamond necklace.

Mathilde enjoys the ball, and especially likes all of the attention she attracts from the men in attendance. When they are due to leave, at four in the morning, they go outside and try to find a cab to take them home. When they arrive home, however, Mathilde is horrified to discover she has lost the necklace!

Loisel retraces their steps but cannot find the lost necklace anywhere. They realise that they will have to replace the necklace, whatever the cost. To buy them some time, they compose a letter to Madame Forestier, claiming that they are having the necklace repaired. They then try to find out where the necklace was made, and have to buy the clasp and the diamonds from separate jewellers.

Loisel racks up thousands of francs in debt, borrowing from friends and from professional moneylenders to raise the cash. They finally have the necklace, which is returned to Madame Forestier, but now they have to pay back the money to all of their creditors.

This takes them ten long years. They dismiss their servant girl and Mathilde has to perform all of the housework, which ages her rapidly. Loisel, meanwhile, takes on a second job, working for a merchant in the evenings. Finally, though, their debts are cleared.

One day, Mathilde bumps into Madame Forestier, who doesn’t recognise her at first because her friend looks so poor and haggard. Now the debt is paid off, Mathilde feels she can tell her friend the truth, and confesses that she lost her friend’s necklace and she and her husband had to buy a replacement.

In a twist, Madame Forestier tells her friend that the necklace she lent Mathilde was made of imitation diamonds, and was virtually worthless. Mathilde and her husband had spent ten years toiling away for no reason.

‘The Necklace’: analysis

In ‘The Necklace’, Guy de Maupassant explores the relationship between appearance and reality. The necklace, of course, is the most explicit example of this: it looks like a genuine diamond necklace but is actually an imitation or fake. And this final twist in the tale leads us to think more carefully about the other details of the story.

But ‘The Necklace’ is more specifically about the dangers of not being happy with what one has, and always wanting more. The nineteenth century saw a rise in the prevalance of consumerism, with many middle-class people seeking to improve their lot and keep up with their friends and neighbours in terms of their possessions, clothes, and social status.

Although Maupassant’s story is hardly searing social satire, the fate of the female protagonist does act as a cautionary tale about the dangers of chasing consumerist gratification in order to impress and be admired by others. The Loisels have a perfectly comfortable lower-middle-class life, and Mathilde has one servant to help around the house.

But this isn’t enough. She dreams of having more. Her food is not enough for her and she wants to dine on finer dishes. One would think she was living a life of poverty from how dissatisfied she is.

This constant desire for more is her undoing, of course – and her husband’s. Her insistence that she have some jewels to wear to the ball is what leads her to find out what real poverty is like, when she and her husband have to downsize from a modest flat to a small garret, and Mathilde has to learn how to work as a servant in her own house. She also loses the natural beauty she had as she has to work so hard at scrubbing the floors.

The critic Rachel Mesch, in her book Having It All in the Belle Epoque , has pointed out that ‘The Necklace’, among other stories, is a kind of Cinderella-story gone awry: whereas Cinderella begins by scrubbing floors and ends up going to the ball in all her finery, Mathilde goes to the ball and, as a result of losing her necklace (not her glass slipper), is reduced to a life of scrubbing floors.

Because she longed for more than she had, she ended up with less than she had to begin with. But the delicious ironic twist at the end of the story shows that her reduction to a life of poverty was all for nothing: just like the admiration she was foolishly and vainly chasing, the necklace she was working to replace was, after all, a sham.

Modern consumerism, then, is a con, with anyone able to afford a cheap imitation necklace able to pass themselves off as a member of the upper classes. Maupassant seems to be suggesting that the ‘finer things’ in life which tempt us are often, at their core, hollow and worthless.

At the same time, however, even when she is reduced to a life of grinding poverty, Mathilde still remembers that one night at the ball when she was admired. It is almost as if she thinks it was worth it, despite what happened next. She wonders what would have happened if she’d never lost the necklace.

Of course, at this stage of the narrative she hasn’t learned that the diamonds she was wearing that night were fakes; perhaps that revelation would make her revise her opinion. And yet, knowing they were imitation diamonds raises further ‘what if’ questions.

If they cost five hundred francs at the most, as Madame Forestier reveals at the end, Loisel’s husband could have easily bought her a cheap necklace and nobody – except for the Loisels themselves – would have been any the wiser. After all, Mathilde was admired at the ball even though she was, it turns out, wearing fake diamonds.

‘The Necklace’ is narrated in the third person by an omniscient narrator. The style is broadly realist, with Maupassant’s narrative voice relating the main details of the story in crisp, concise prose. We don’t get – as we would in the work of later modernist writers – detailed insight into the characters’ thoughts and feelings, although we are given occasional details about Mathilde’s feelings towards her situation.

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Literary Analysis of The Necklace: Essay Example

The necklace: introduction of the essay, the necklace by guy de maupassant: characterization, the necklace essay: conflict and narration, the necklace by guy de maupassant: setting and atmosphere, the necklace essay: tone, language, and major theme, the necklace essay: critical perspective, the necklace: conclusion of the essay.

The Necklace (La Parure) is one of the most famous short stories by Guy De Maupassant. It tells a story about a middle-class French couple in the 19th century. The wife is longing for a luxurious life, unappreciative of her husband, and a relatively happy life the couple is leading. Madame Loisel spends her time dreaming about all the luxuries they cannot afford to purchase while experiencing a feeling of shame for their actual life. The events described in the story reveal the features of the character of the heroine, which eventually leads her to live a life far poorer than she used to lead. An unexpected and ironic outcome provides a complex moral lesson that the readers are supposed to learn along with Madame Loisel. In the end, she learns that her image of high society was not real; the lack of appreciation for her moderate but sufficient fortune led to a disastrous outcome, and her husband’s efforts to provide for her went undeservingly unnoticed. The deceptiveness of appearances is the major theme of the story.

The main heroine, Madame Loisel, comes from a family of clerks. With no dowry and no hopes of being married to a wealthy man, she becomes the wife of a clerk from the Ministry of Education. Mathilde does not enjoy her life, as it is far too modest. She believes she was born to lead a lavish lifestyle and spends her time imagining the rich and luxurious surroundings she deserves (Maupassant 789). The emotions she experiences because of her poor lifestyle are rather strong, as she regards it as a misfortune and even an insult. Mathilde does not appreciate her husband’s efforts to provide for her at all costs. Upon receiving an invitation to a high society soirée, she is miserable due to the lack of clothing and jewelry worthy of a well-off and distinguished person.

Monsieur Loisel is a generous and loving husband. To please his wife, he denies himself the pleasure of buying a gun, giving up the money for Mathilde’s gown for the ball. Monsieur Loisel is attentive to his wife’s changing moods and gives her valuable advice on how to get the jewelry they cannot afford. During the soirée, he does not attempt to tarnish his wife’s delight at being appreciated and admired and sleeps in a waiting room until four o’clock in the morning, even though he must be at work four hours later. Monsieur Loisel displays the qualities of a loving and attentive husband, striving to please his wife. Madame Loisel, however, does not appreciate his attention, as she regards him as an unimportant figure in society, unable to afford to lead a luxurious lifestyle.

There is a third-person narration in the story, with an omniscient point of view, providing us with the innermost thoughts and feelings of the main characters. The conflict described by Maupassant in this short story revolves around Mathilde and the lost necklace. Striving to fit in with the members of high society, Madame Loisel is willing to borrow a diamond necklace from a friend, which she loses after the soirée. Due to her pride, she is unable to tell the truth. She is ashamed that they cannot afford to replace such expensive jewelry. Therefore, the conflict of the story is tied to the lost necklace and the couple’s desperate struggles to repay the debt, which leads them, in the end, to life in poverty, a complete opposite of what Mathilde has always wanted.

The Necklace is set in 19th-century Paris, the Belle Époque. It includes descriptions of middle-class interiors, as well as of high society’s lavish lifestyle. Material things are described through Mathilde’s daydreaming about the luxurious life she was meant to lead. Her actual surroundings are described as ugly and poor, making her suffer greatly. The atmosphere of the story could be seen as dynamic since it changes as the plot evolves. Before losing the necklace, the atmosphere seems rather light and ironic. The reader follows Mathilde’s “sorrows” with a hint of a smile, perceiving her capriciousness and the lack of appreciation for her husband’s affection as typical qualities in a vain young wife. However, after the necklace is lost, there is a substantial shift in the atmosphere. Superficial vanity gives way to the pride that drives the couple to the brink of poverty. The light atmosphere of the first part is followed by the gloomy atmosphere of the last part, with an ironic twist at the end, meant to stress the moral lesson.

The tone is the attitude the author conveys by presenting the events and characters in a certain way. Some aspects of linguistic features indicate the author’s ironic attitude towards the main heroine. For instance, his use of the words “suffer,” “insult,” “torment,” “despair,” and “misery” shows Mathilde’s vainness and her inability to appreciate her life. The husband’s rhetorical question at dinner, “What could be better?” contrasts with her dreams about a luxurious lifestyle. The second part of the story, where the couple is forced to work hard to pay off their debt, indicates the pride of the main heroine: “She played her part heroically” (Maupassant 793).

Aside from irony, Maupassant uses symbolism as a way to convey the central theme of the story. The necklace symbolizes the high society Mathilde is so eager to join. However, as the necklace turns out to be a mere imitation, it symbolizes the superficial nature of the upper class’ appeal. The fake necklace symbolizes the illusion that Madame Loisel is captivated by, eventually leading to a disastrous outcome. Thus, the story’s major theme lies in the idea that notions such as beauty, wealth, poorness, and happiness depend on an individual’s perception. The appearances of upper-class lifestyles were deceptive, just like Mathilde’s appearance at the soirée, where she was such a success. However, neither the necklace nor Mathilde’s seemingly luxurious appearance was genuine. This leads us to believe that Maupassant wanted to stress the importance of the illusory nature of appearances, in which the 19th-century French bourgeoisie was so immersed.

From a sociological/Marxist criticism standpoint, Madame Loisel is a member of the middle class, an aspiring member of the upper class, and, ultimately, a lower-class member. The inability to accept her position in society and a constant yearning for a wealthier life lead the couple to find themselves at the bottom of the social structure. The amount of expensive material possessions indicates the class the people belong to, as well as their social status. Mathilde is deceived by the superficial signs of wealth, leading to her becoming a servant class member.

The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant tells the story of a woman preoccupied with her desire to be wealthy and to belong to the upper class. The ironic twist at the end of the story renders her perception inconsistent with reality. As the plot unravels, the deceptiveness of appearances turns out to be the main reason for the disastrous outcome. 

Maupassant, Guy De. “The Necklace.” Short Fiction. Classic and Contemporary. Ed. Charles Bohner and Lyman Grant. Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006. 789-795. Print.

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Guy de Maupassant: “The Necklace” Essay

The necklace: introduction, deceptiveness of appearance, the necklace: conclusion, works cited.

Written by Guy de Maupassant in 1881, The Necklace is a captivating short story that ends in a surprise. It is the most eye-catching work of Maupassant with all words contributing to the events that the narrative unfolds. It has garnered him a lot of acknowledgment.

The tale is set in Paris, France specifically covering Loisel’s home and the neighborhoods, ministry of education inclusive. Employing the elements of literature, Maupassant has used characters like monsieur Loisel, a clerk in the ministry of education, Mathilde, Loisel’s wife, Madame Jeanne Forestier, Mathilde’s neighbor and friend, Housemaid, Mathilde’s house servant, among others.

The writer takes the reader through the life of these characters and in particular, the poor family of Loisel and the rich family of Forestier. It unfolds that the kind of life depicted by these two categories of people is far from the reality. This illustration builds up the prevailing theme of the narrative ‘the deceptiveness of appearance’, which the writer employs to show how people are deceived by the appearance of others.

Mathilde is a reasonably attractive girl regardless of her unfortunate family backgrounds. She regrets much owing to this poverty because she always compares herself with the other girls from well up homes. For instance, Forestier’s family is rich. She gets married to a mere government clerk. The ministry of education organizes a party for all its staff members, giving them a chance to invite their wives or husbands.

Ironically, thinking that this would thrill his wife, Loisel on delivering the invitation, realizes that it is more of a stress than joy to her. “Instead of being delighted, she threw the invitation on the table with disdain murmuring…” (Maupassant 39). The reason behind this is that she lacks elegant dresses and necklaces like other women, a case that makes her imagine how odd she can be if she attends the occasion.

They end up borrowing these from Forestier, but unfortunately the necklace gets lost after the event, an incidence that costs Loisel’s family virtually everything as they toil for ten years looking the money to purchase another one. They finally buy 36000 francs worthy necklace but on returning it to Forestier; she reveals its cost as just 500 francs. They are now in a severe financial crisis, though had they realized the truth, this would not be the case.

A major problem that the writer fails to clarify is whether Forestier resells the necklace to refund the extra money in order to reduce the debt incurred or not. This paves way to criticisms of his story, though he has managed to develop the dominant theme of the story. Mathilde stands out in the party as a rich and a high class wife owing to the diamond-appearing necklace that the people fail to realize that it was borrowed.

Still on this theme, Forestier’s family is depicted as financially stable. It can afford some of the expensive things that poor families imagine of. Forestier has, not only one but many of them, unlike her counterpart Mathilde.

She wears them when attending great occasions, a case that earns her a good deal of recognition from other people. This is what Mathilde is yearning for. She wants to appear like her friend. She wants people to view her as rich. The writer shows how she longs for a recognized family name as well as an expensive dowry. By this she feels that she will appear like other rich families.

She is pictured as one, who is ever working towards achieving this reality, though what she publicizes is not what is on the ground. For instance, in the party, she appears the most elegant, a situation that makes all people want to chat with her, owing to what they are seeing, an expensive looking dress and a diamond necklace, but little do they know about the truth of the matter.

Following the issue behind Forestier’s necklace, it stands out that it is not made of diamond as people perceive. Though what appears in their eyes is the diamond look on the necklace, the story ends when Forestier reveals that it is just a mere coating. To strengthen his theme, the writer wants to show how the rich end up deceiving other people through their possessions.

Most of them appear costly before the eyes of people but rarely are they in their real senses. The value attached to some items, owing to their appearance, turns out to be many times different from their real values. For instance, the necklace appears 72 times expensive. The writer succeeds in showing how people mistake the rich people.

They have been portrayed as just appearing as if they are rich, which is not the case. Worthy noting is that the writer does not clarify about the child who appears to walk with Forestier. It is not clear whether he is intending to elaborate his theme further by introducing images of people who are not real characters, or not. This again welcomes criticisms to his works.

Though dead and forgotten, Maupassant works speak volumes of his existence. The ideas behind his Necklace narrative stands out clear today. The issue of appearance is now everywhere with people struggling to hide their real selves in order to mislead others. Items have been manufactured bearing a false identity of others only to trick people. This is the kind of life that the writer was prophesying through the use of his major theme ‘the deceptiveness of appearance’ that he develops through the different characters.

Maupassant, Guy. “The Necklace” France: Word Press, 1881. P. 38-44.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 29). Guy de Maupassant: "The Necklace" Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-necklace/

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1. IvyPanda . "Guy de Maupassant: "The Necklace" Essay." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-necklace/.

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IvyPanda . "Guy de Maupassant: "The Necklace" Essay." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-necklace/.

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THE NECKLACE by Guy de Maupassant: A Critique of Class-Consciousness

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“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, Essay Example

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Oppression plays a large role in the brilliant short story by Guy de Maupassant entitled “The Necklace”.  In it, a middle-class woman, Matilda Loisel, who dreams of a luxurious life, is able to have one, glorious night at a ball, wearing a borrowed necklace of diamonds from her childhood friend.  Sometime during the night of the ball, the necklace is lost.  She and her husband go into great debt to buy a replacement, living a life of great poverty for a decade to pay off the debt they incurred to do this.  Years later, the woman meets her old friend by chance in the park and brags of how much she and her husband went through to replace the necklace, only to be told that the necklace was made only costume jewelry and “were not worth five hundred francs”.

The oppression that de Maupassant writes about in this story is two-fold.  The first kind of oppression, in the first section of the short story, comes from within Matilda herself because of her unrealistic dreams and expectations for her life.  The second kind of oppression, more concrete, comes in the second part of the story, where Matilda and her husband both have to give up what comforts they had to begin with in order to pay off the debt that they owe for the necklace.  Both kinds of oppression take their toll are Matilda (though in different ways) and both will be analyzed at length in this paper.

Inner Oppression: The Burden of Fantasy

Guy de Maupassant begins to discuss the theme of Matilda’s inner oppression (or self-oppression) in the first paragraph of the story, introducing her as “one of those pretty, charming young ladies, born….into a family of clerks” (de Maupassant 31), showing the reader from the start that there is a huge divide between Matilda’s life as it is and Matilda’s life the way she wants it to be.  It is obvious that Matilda’s middle class life, married to a clerk from the Board of Education (a worthy but not perhaps very romantic job) is very distressing for her, and she is forever fantasizing unrealistically about what her life might have been like if she had married someone “either rich or distinguished” (31).  While she sits in her apartment of “the shabby walls, the worn chairs, the faded stuffs” (31), she dreams only of “large drawing-rooms, hung in old silks, of graceful pieces of furniture carrying bric-a-brac of inestimable value” (32).

These beginning paragraphs are important to the story because they show from the very first that Matilda is a woman whose oppression comes from within herself: she oppresses herself by longing for a life that she cannot have; she oppresses herself by being unhappy and discontented with the life that she does have.  The frustration that she feels with her life is palpable in the beginning of the story and it is important because it sets the stage for, and gives impetus to, what is going to happen: i.e. the fateful night of the ball, a night which is to forever change the course of Matilda’s life.

When Matilda’s husband comes home with an invitation for the ball at the home of the Minister of Public Instruction, it seems that Matilda’s fantasies might become reality for her, but instead of jumping at the chance to live the kind of life (if only for one evening) that she always dreamed of, she shrinks away at first, asking her husband irritably, “What do you suppose I have to wear to such a thing as that?” (33) and promptly bursts into tears; she is not so distraught, though, that she cannot make a quick and shrewd estimate of how much money she can get out of her husband for a new outfit: “She reflected for some seconds, making estimates and thinking of a sum that she could ask for without bringing with it an immediate refusal…from the economical clerk” (33).  And to make her fantasy life complete, she borrows what she thinks is a fabulous necklace from her childhood friend Mrs. Forestier.

Matilda is freed from her self-oppression for one night, the night of the ball, where she gets to live her fantasy in a way that she always wanted to, and de Maupassant notes that she “was a great success.  She was the prettiest of all, elegant, gracious, smiling, and full of joy” (34).  But at the end of the evening, reality comes back in full force, and Matilda feels oppressed once again when she and her husband wrap up in “modest garments of everyday wear, whose poverty clashed with the elegance of the ball costume” (34) and Matilda wishes to get away quickly, as she feels oppressed again by “the other women wrapping themselves in rich furs” (34). In her haste, she and her husband wind up on a bit of misadventure going home and when they arrive back at their apartment, they find that Matilda has lost the necklace.  De Maupassant is well aware of what is in store for Matilda when he writes that “she removed the wraps from her shoulders before the glass, for a final view of herself in her glory” This will, indeed, be the “final view” for Matilda, for a second later, she realizes that the necklace in missing, and with that missing necklace comes the second, outer form of oppression in this story: the oppression of poverty.

Outer Oppression: The Burden of Poverty

In the fall-out from the loss of the necklace, Mr. and Mrs. Loisel replace the piece of jewelry at a tremendous cost to their middle-class household: thirty-six thousand francs, which they beg and borrow and use up their inheritance to purchase.  Whether she realized it and appreciated it or not, Matilda’s life was one of middle-class comfort before, but all that is to change with the loss of the necklace.  And now the real, outer oppression, the oppression of poverty, takes hold of Matilda’s life. De Maupassant tells the reader that Matilda “now knew the horrible life of necessity” (36), and a lot of their modest middle-class trappings have to go: “they sent away the maid; they changed their lodgings; they rented some rooms under a mansard roof” (36).  So now, the poor life that Matilda has always imagined that she led has become a poor life indeed.  Without a maid to take care of these things for her, she is forced to shoulder, “the heavy cares of a household, the odious work of a kitchen” (36) but with great sacrifice, she and her husband pay off the debt that they incurred to replace the necklace, a debt which takes them a decade to pay off.

The oppression of poverty has a terrible affect upon Matilda.  De Maupassant describes her, after this decade of economic oppression, as “a strong, hard woman, the crude woman of a poor household. Her hair was badly dressed, her skirts awry, her hands red” (37).  This is no longer the bored middle class woman with a maid who fantasized about a life of wealth, although, even in the difficulty of her poverty, she “would seat herself before the window and think of that evening party of former times, of that ball when she had been so beautiful and so flattered” (37).  The fantasy seems different now: in the first part of the story, the fantasy is the vehicle of for Matilda’s self-oppression, the way in which she tortures herself for not having the kind of life she dreams of; by the end of the story, the fantasy has becomes a means of escape from the real, outer oppression of her poverty.  The image of Matilda, resting for a while from her work and thinking for a few minutes about the one night of her life when she was free from the oppressions of her discontent – the night of her life which was also her downfall and led to the oppression of her new life of poverty – is one of the most poignant scenes in the story.

If the story ended there, it would still be tragic, but De Maupassant is not yet done twisting his knife.  In the final scene of the story, the old, hard Matilda, walking in the Champs Elysee  “to rid herself of the cares of the week” (38), runs into her old friend Madame Forestier, “still young, still pretty, still attractive” (38), in contrast to Matilda herself.  Matilda cannot help but brag to Mrs. Forestier of the diamond necklace she replaced at such a tremendous cost, only to have Forestier exclaim that the necklace was cheap costume jewelry and that Matilda has ruined her life for nothing.

To conclude, this is a poignant story about the life of a woman who is at first oppressed by the unattainable fantasies that she has for herself, and then is oppressed by the poverty which results when she tries to make her fantasies into reality.  Both the oppression of her fantasies (the oppression that comes from within herself) and the oppression of poverty (the oppression that comes from the circumstance of her life) exact a toll on her.  De Maupassant, in this story, seems to be exploring the ways in which someone’s character flaws (in this case, Matilda’s unrealistic expectations for her life) can bring about a tragic end for them.  It is Matilda’s ravenous need to act out her fantasies that leads her to borrow the necklace to begin with, then hurry away from the party because she is ashamed of her wrap and lose the necklace in the process, and thus condemn herself to ten years of pointless poverty.  She is, truly, both a victim of her own oppression and of the oppression which life lays down upon her, and the second form of oppression is a direct result of the first. One reason why this story is such a classic, why it can be read even so long after it was written by people in a very different society, is because of De Maupassant’s understanding of the ways in which people do indeed oppress themselves and of the ways in which the circumstances of their life can oppress them as well.  Both are equally tragic and seem equally difficult to combat.

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Literary Analysis Interpretation The Novel of The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant's - Research Paper Example

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‘Bless These Books’: How Karen Kingsbury Is Extending the Reach of Christian Fiction

She’s sold more than 25 million copies, but isn’t slowing down. An Amazon series and a film getting wide distribution mark a new phase.

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By Alexis Soloski

Reporting from Nashville

In the early years of her career, the novelist Karen Kingsbury often prayed for success. “Lord,” she would say, “bless these books beyond anything I could ask or imagine. Let them be bigger than anything I could envision and let them change culture.”

Was it right to pray for something so worldly? Kingsbury, seated at a table in the well-appointed kitchen of her home in an upscale suburb here, smiled. The question was perhaps naïve. “I feel like it’s OK,” she explained. “God knows what you’re thinking anyway, you know?”

Kingsbury, 60, has long been hailed as the queen of Christian fiction . That is perhaps a slender crown. Until fairly recently, Christian fiction was siloed from the mainstream market, sold only at specialty bookstores. Crossover authors were rare, and as with the writers of “This Present Darkness,” “The Shack” and the “Left Behind” series, almost exclusively male. Will Kingsbury join them?

“Depending on what you think of as the mainstream market, I think she already has,” Daniel Silliman, a news editor at Christianity Today, said.

The author or coauthor of nearly 100 books, she has sold more than 25 million copies , according to Simon and Schuster (Its Atria imprint has published her latest novels). Three of her books have become Hallmark movies. A fourth, “A Thousand Tomorrows,” was adapted as a series for the faith-based streaming site Great American Pure Flix .

On the flight to Nashville, my seatmate, a nurse and a practicing Catholic, clocking my reading material, confessed her love for Kingsbury. “Her books make me happy and they give me peace,” she said. My ride-share driver knew her, too. Still, she is not yet a household name.

“I’m not John Grisham,” she said. “I’m not Nicholas Sparks.”

That may change. This week, Amazon Prime Video premieres “The Baxters,” a three-season adaptation of Kingsbury’s most popular series, produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett’s Lightworkers Media. And on April 2, Kingsbury’s new production company will release the romantic drama “Someone Like You” into 1,500 theaters, which may markedly increase her visibility.

That day in March, Kingsbury wore a sapphire-blue coat and a matching flowered necklace, intimations of spring. Her daisy-yellow hair fell in gentle ripples and in the hours we spent together I lost count of her offers of tea, coffee, pastries, fruit, chicken in various preparations. (Later, she wouldn’t let me leave without a baggie full of apples and string cheese.)

Entwined with this maternal energy is a rigor that has allowed her to write as many as five books each year while raising six children — three biological, three adopted as boys from Haiti — with her husband, Donald Russell.

“I’m compassionate,” she said. “But I’m competitive and I’m passionate and not passive.” Still, she tends to downplay that drive, crediting God’s grace.

A few hours before I arrived, the marketing team at Amazon had called to tell her that “The Baxters” would have a billboard overlooking Sunset Boulevard. “It does feel like an answer to a prayer,” she said. “I just feel like I can almost see God smiling.” Then she offered cookies.

Kingsbury grew up mostly in the San Fernando Valley; her voice still carries that sunshine lilt. She matriculated at Cal State Northridge, pursuing a journalism degree. The Los Angeles Times hired her onto its sports desk before she graduated, even though she knew nothing about sports.

A few years later she was poached by the Los Angeles Daily News. Around that time, at the gym, she met Russell, a clean-cut trainee teacher who insisted on bringing a Bible to their dates. Kingsbury, who had never read the Bible, found Russell infuriating. She also found him cute. Eventually, she bought her own Bible and a concordance, mostly so that she could prove to him that the Bible didn’t prohibit premarital sex.

Soon, she and Russell were baptized. Then they were married. She was pregnant six months later. An agent reached out and a contract for a nonfiction book, based on one of her newspaper crime stories, followed. Kingsbury wrote that book and three more. But the work, which relied on interviews with accused killers and grieving families, wore her down. So she tried fiction, taking 10 days off to write “Where Yesterday Lives,” inspired by her childhood.

Her publisher, Dell, didn’t want it. Other mainstream publishers passed, too. Kingsbury didn’t know much about Christian fiction. “I thought it sounded cheesy,” she said. But when a friend gave her a copy of Francine Rivers’s 1991 book “Redeeming Love,” a classic of Christian romance, Kingsbury intuited that her books might find welcome there. She was correct—“Where Yesterday Lives” was published by Multnomah, a small Christian imprint, in 1998. Still, she resisted that label, exchanging “Christian fiction” for “inspirational fiction,” then trademarking her own term, “life-changing fiction.”

Kingsbury writes quickly. That 10 days per book? It’s an average, not an outlier. (She once wrote a book in four days; she doesn’t recommend it.) Each begins with an idea, usually drawn from her own life. “I go through a day looking for miracles, looking for moments, looking for people,” she said. She spends about a week researching and another week outlining. Then she writes 10,000 words per day, typically in six hours, faster than most of us can type.

Her son Tyler Russell, who had dropped by for Scrabble and a chat, recalled that while watching his mother write was a feature of his childhood, she always put her family first. “It was never like, ‘Leave me alone. I’m writing,’” he said. “It was like, ‘I’ll sit with you, we’ll watch ‘American Idol’ and write together.’”

Most of Kingsbury’s books are romances, but they are romantic dramas, not romantic comedies. The characters experience terrible things — abuse, addiction, illness, accident. Yet each book ultimately affirms faith and family. Her father, Kingsbury said, coined a term for her genre: “hope operas.”

“It’s not necessarily a romantic happily ever after,” Kaitlin Olson, Kingsbury’s editor at Atria, said. “But these stories end with people coming to terms with themselves and their faith and moving forward.”

Kingsbury’s use of real-life problems distinguishes her from her contemporaries. “She was really early to a broader trend we see now of tackling less sweet topics,” Silliman said. “Not exactly gritty, but more realistic.”

The characters in her novels do reflect a particular reality: They are nearly always Christians, practicing or lapsed, and seemingly all straight. As the mother of three Black children, she does employ some racial diversity.

But she believes that introducing other diversity would feel too forced. “In terms of L.G.B.T.Q. or trans, any of those communities, I’m so removed from that in my day to day, it wouldn’t feel authentic,” she said. “It would just be agenda-ized.”

She is similarly cautious about sensitive issues. “Someone Like You,” for example, deals with in vitro fertilization and embryo adoption, but neatly skirts any political debate.

“I want to be authentic to the issues today, but not so much that it takes you into controversy,” she said.

Still, Kingsbury does have an agenda, or perhaps several agendas. She wants to tell a good story. She wants each book to be better than the last. (“I’m competitive with myself,” she said.) And while she believes that secular readers can enjoy her books, each is an invitation to faith.

“I would hope, when people finish a book, that coming in through the door of the heart — not like a hammer, but like a whisper — is the fact that maybe there’s something more,” she said.

In her first decades in fiction, she passed through many imprints, some owned by major publishing houses, some independent, always pursuing better marketing, better publicity, more ambitious print runs. “During those years, my least favorite place to go was a bookstore,” she said.

Because often the bookstores wouldn’t have her books at all.

That began to change, slowly, with the Baxter novels, which were initially co-written with the relationship expert Gary Smalley. The story of the Baxters begins with “Redemption” (2002), in which Kari Jacobs, née Baxter, the second eldest of five children, discovers that her husband is having an affair with one of his students. Some in her family urge her to divorce him. But Kari, who believes that marriage is a commitment, trusts in God instead.

Those books and the ones that followed increased Kingsbury’s renown and market share. Women began to show up to her readings in homemade “Baxter Babes” T-shirts. Signing lines lasted hours.

Downey, an actress (“Touched by an Angel”) and an advocate for faith-based work, was given “Redemption” years ago. She read it. Then she read all the other books in the series. Downey’s company, Lightworkers, a division of MGM, shot three seasons, in 2017 and 2018. The series languished, seeking a streamer, before finally finding its way to Amazon, which had acquired MGM in 2022, as part of a growing slate of faith-based programming.

The years that the series sat on a virtual shelf pushed Kingsbury to found her own production company, giving her more control over subsequent adaptations. She chose “Someone Like You” as her inaugural project because, as she finished it, she said she heard God say, “This is going to be your first movie.”

Her son and frequent co-writer, Tyler, was recruited to direct. Another son acts in the movie, a third was a production assistant. Each day began with devotion.

Kingsbury would like to make more movies. She is competitive about film, too. And she plans to publish more books, the next three via Forefront, a hybrid of traditional and independent publishing that she will believes will offer more flexibility.

At the moment, as far as her career is concerned, she has little left to pray for.

“There were times in my life when this was just a dream, and then there were times that in the last few years where I could see it coming,” she said. “But now it’s here and I’m ready.”

Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media. More about Alexis Soloski

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