Jewett’s reputation as a credible and influential writing remains virtually unchanged. After her death, "Jewett's reputation quickly stabilized into a pattern which continues" today (Nagel xi). Jewett is compared to Mary Wilkins Freeman, and the two have been referred to as the foremost regional writers of New England in their time. In 1913, Edward M. Chapman associated Jewett's local color writing positively with that of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen. Henry James, a reputable critic, thought Jewett's work “to be exceeded only by the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Bliss Perry” (Nagel xi). Her writing was praised by great literaryt figures such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell. In fact, in 1901 Bowdoin College awarded her an Litt.D. degree, the first such honor awarded to a woman. Sarah Orne Jewett developed a style of fiction of her own. Over time, her dedication and repetitive success landed her among the most respected regional and local color writers.

Many critics award Jewett great accomplishment in shaping poetry as an American writer in the twentieth century. In 1967, Jay Martin referenced F.O. Matthiessen’s fictive fence in regards to Jewett, and cautioned “we Americans had better build more fences then take any way from our lives” (Martin). In more recent criticism, Marilyn Sanders Mobley has adopted the idea of the fictive fence and has used it to enclose one of the chapters on “folk roots” of Jewett and Toni Morrison’s work. She is often also credited with impacting the women’s literary movement by “connecting two generations of women writers” (Lauter 131). Besides being known for her regional style of writing, Sarah Jewett is recognized today for her representation of womanly characters. Her characters are usually aged women as opposed to young lively men (Nagel). With the development of Women's Studies as a field of study in higher education, a second wave of Jewett's popularity emerged. In her poetry as well as in her most famed novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs, are the themes of mother-daughter love and sisterhood bonds "suggesting her vision of an alternative world - woman-centered… existing outside of masculine America" (Lauter, 131).. The theme of female initiation or the idea of women breaking out of male dominated society can also be interpreted in Jewett's "A White Heron" as well as in a great deal of her poetry.

 In the broadest sense, even before Sarah met Annie Adams Fields, the “celebrated salon hostess and wife of the American publishing powerhouse James T. Fields” (Webb) and was introduced to a variety of individuals who shook up the norm of society, Jewett and her authorship friends were already in the process of successfully redefining specific features of late nineteenth century women’s independence in order to participate ever more actively and manifestly in the masculine, public sphere. As with the women novelists who were so popular for much of the 1880’s-1870’s, the "literary domestics" that Mary Kelly describes so vibrantly in Private Woman: Public Stage, Sarah Jewett and her friends would continue to expand earlier definitions of women's roles through emphasizing their critical duties as nurturing mother figures and moral guides within the home. Celestial stimulation, Christian conscientiousness, and progressively more, civic responsibility, instilled in their minds an authoritative command for enlightening actions of all kinds. In Jewett's case, of course, she foremost expressed these values through her devotion to writing. As Kathy Sklar says about the ideology of separate spheres, the women, although "[f]ar from instilling obedience, the ideology of domesticity could… for example, lead women to repudiate both heterosexuality and their familial responsibilities” (Sklar). Jewett was a prominent author in closing the gap between the separate men’s and women’s spheres of the patriarchal world (Reuben; Kelly; Webb).

Much of Jewett’s most shocking work came from her treatment of homoeroticism. She herself formed many close bonds with woman, ultimately ending in a “Boston Marriage” to Annie Adams Fields. In 1911, the Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett were edited by Annie Adams Fields. They lived together for several months each year in Boston, and they often traveled abroad. An essay by Josephine Donovan helps to reveal their relationship: “The Unpublished Love Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett.” The majority of her poetry that followed Dean’s suggestion to steer away from the genre, came in the form of private poems to Fields, expressing Jewett’s love for the woman and their relationship. Jewett carved the way for future American authors by practicing her freedom of speech and bringing to light a subject that had been kept in the dark- homosexuality (Reuben).