Jewett’s publications were instantly met with great merit by her audience; however, she had some initial trouble getting published. In a letter written home during the summer of her first publication, Jewett wrote that her efforts at the reading club as well as verbal responses to the poetry she published were “met with great applause” (Webb). It is no wonder that her return home coincided with her first real attempts to publish her work to a greater audience. Jewett was always seeking “the largest possible audience and sphere of influence. She would always try to balance the needs of both the ‘serious’ and the ‘pleasure-seeking’ reader” (Webb). Her original attempts focused primarily on poetry but discouragement led her to try her hand at fiction. In 1968-1969, she bombarded children’s as well as adult’s magazines with her work. Only on her third attempt, “Mr. Bruce” appeared in The Atlantic (Blanchard 73). During this same time, one of her children’s poems, “The Baby-House Famine”, was accepted for Our Young Folks (Webb).

During this period of exploration, Jewett’s letters to editors were seemingly light-hearted but many critics believe that there is evidence that she had “high expectations for her writing” (Blanchard 58-59) from the very beginning. She was very disconcerted when The Atlantic refused another of her works the following year after “Mr. Bruce”. Following two more rejected submissions, Jewett wrote a letter to the editors of The Atlantic flat-out asking if she should give up her career as a writer.  However, her old friend William Dean Howells had recently taken over the editor’s chair and replied to Jewett, urging her not to give up.  In fact, he had told her it was "eminently worth while" (Sklar) for her to continue her efforts, though he did guide her away from poetry, which had been the principal of her affection. His response revived Jewett as a writer and began the onset of her career (Webb; Howard 372).

Jewett’s work was met with early positive criticism. She was a prolific author, publishing her first major story in 1868, when she was just nineteen years old, and the next year another story became the first of many of her works to appear in Atlantic Monthly, as well as other prestigious magazines. She gained a close relationship with William Dean Howells, an editor of the Atlantic. Howells encouraged her to collect several sketches and use them as inspiration for a fictional framework. These sketches became the basis for her 1877 novel, Deephaven. Exceptional collections of stories and similar sketches followed: Old Friends and New (1879), Country By-ways (1881), A White Heron and Other Stories (1886), and A Native of Winby and Other Tales (1893). In between her major novels and short stories, Jewett wrote successful childrens’ books, including Play Days (1878), The Story of the Normans (1887), and Betty Leicester (1890). Her novels included A Country Doctor (1884), A Marsh Island (1885), and the book generally considered to be her masterpiece, The Country of Pointed Firs (1896).

Recent criticism of Jewett’s regionalist poetry, and the local color genre as a whole, seeks to “reevalu[ate] regionalism from a different point of view, developing the relational perspective on regionalism proposed by Raymond Williams” (Howard 386).  Both contemporary criticism on Jewett’s work specifically, as well as critical literature on regionalism as “the botanical metaphor of rootedness” (Howard 366) suggest that this genre of literature has a natural connection to a particular place which implies an almost immobility, restraining the literature to the confinements of that place and time. This idea is often evoked in Jewett critics by an image used by F.O. Matthiessen in the opening sentence of his 1929 biography: “The first thing she could remember was a world bounded by the white paling fences around her house” (Matthiessen I). The portrayal of a fence embodies the idea of closure and detention. Many current feminist critics as well as others describe Jewett’s work as lacking in plot but vivid in character development.