Freeman's reputation was built upon her unsentimental and realistic portrayals of the rural nineteenth-century New England life. She was known for her ironic sense of humor and the idiosyncratic and colorful characters who populate her stories. Writing for Harper's New Monthly Magazine in September of 1887, William Dean Howells, a lifetime friend, mentor, and fan of Freeman, praised her first volume of short stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories, for its "absence of literosity" and its "directness and simplicity."

An anonymous critic who reviewed A New England Nun and Other Stories for the Atlantic Monthly in 1891 noted Freeman's "short economical sentences, with no waste and no niggardliness," her "passion for brevity, her power for packing a whole story in a phrase, a word," and her "fine artistic sense." This critic found the short story "A New England Nun" particularly remarkable for its realism and praised the...