Jennie Felton Books in Order

If you want the core Fairley Terrace story: All The Dark Secrets → The Miner's Daughter → The Girl Below Stairs → The Widow's Promise → The Sister's Secret
If you want a tense mother and baby story: The Stolen Child
If you want a big house full of secrets: A Mother's Heartbreak
If you want coastal drama and family mystery: The Smuggler's Girl

Jennie Felton is one of the pen names used by novelist Janet Tanner. She grew up in Radstock, Somerset, in the old coalfield country that later fed so much of her fiction. That background shows up again and again in her books, not just in the mines and cottages, but in the close family networks, the money worries, and the stubborn pride of working people.

Writing started early.

As a schoolgirl, she wrote romantic serials for classmates on torn-out exercise book pages and passed them around the classroom. She later recalled being caught writing during chemistry, which brought that first little publishing run to a halt. Even after she became an established novelist, she still liked to draft in pencil before moving the words to a computer.

Her route into print was practical as much as artistic. As a young mother and the wife of a policeman, she wanted extra money and something more creative than endless housework, so she sent a story to a women's magazine. It sold, and that small success turned into years of writing short stories and serials on commission.

That steady apprenticeship mattered. It taught her how to build cliffhangers, keep a family story moving, and make readers care quickly.

In 1981 she published her first novel under her own name, Janet Tanner. It drew on her home town and on stories passed down by her father, who had worked as a carting boy in the Somerset coalfield. Later she also wrote as Amelia Carr, and then as Jennie Felton when Headline asked her for a new run of family sagas.

Somerset never really left the page.

That is easy to see in All The Dark Secrets, The Miner's Daughter, and The Girl Below Stairs, the books that make up the heart of the Fairley Terrace world. Readers come to them for strong women, hard choices, village life, and the way romance and trouble are always tangled together. The later Fairley Terrace novels, The Widow's Promise and The Sister's Secret, keep building that same world through grief, loyalty, family strain, and long-buried secrets.

Her standalones show a slightly different side of the same strengths. The Stolen Child turns fear and doubt inside a mining family into a tense emotional story. A Mother's Heartbreak leans into the unease of a grand house marked by loss. The Smuggler's Girl shifts the scene to the Cornish coast, with shipwreck history, hidden family ties, and a bold plan that can only end in trouble. Across all of them, Felton tends to write about ordinary women under pressure, women trying to keep going when love, money, grief, or the past refuses to leave them alone.

After her husband Terry died in 2013, she later wrote about moving to Bristol to be closer to her two daughters and four grandchildren. She has also shared that she enjoys reading, walking, swimming, and travel, and that earning a private pilot's licence was one of the proudest things she ever did. That little surprise, the pilot's licence, feels nicely in character.

There is warmth in her books, but she never makes life too easy.

What keeps readers with Jennie Felton is the balance. Her novels know that families can be loving and difficult at the same time, that home can be both comfort and trap, and that the past has a way of walking straight into the present. If you like historical sagas with strong settings, emotional pull, and women who have to think on their feet, her work is easy to settle into and hard to leave behind.