Sarah Orne Jewett's place in the literary canon

Read a few more stories by Sarah Orne Jewett in the terrific Library of America edition of her work and have come to believe that she may not be a great writer - her output is limited in scope and size compared w/ her greatest contemporaries, James, Cather, Wharton to name three, but she's of nearly the same rank and her best work, the novel Country of the Pointed Firs, is nearly as good as Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. The stand-alone stories of SOF's that I've read - that is, not part of Pointed Firs or the other stories about the fictional Maine town of Dunnet Landing - are in the same style as her other work, a lot of narration unspooled as two or more people, often but not always two women, share stories of their past or tell their life story to a visitor, replete w/ excellent NE dialect writing (Strunk & White warning: Don't write dialect unless your ear is good. Hers is.) Her story about a walk in Autumn is a small thing of beauty, as she captures not just the obvious beauty of the season - the changing leaves, crisp air, etc. - but the sense of fulfillment from a full harvest, the comparison with old age and a look back at one's life; she must have been influenced by Keats's great ode to Autumn, but she builds from the insight into a nice short narrative. Two others that are noted by title in the jacket copy are The White Heron and story about two women sitting watch over the dead body of a friend, Tempy (can't recall the title of the story); this latter story is quite subtle as we gradually realize that the two watchers are of different temperaments and don't especially get along, but they are united in a way in spending the long, scary hours on the body-watch before the morning's funeral. The Heron story is especially powerful, as it's about a lonely 9-year-old girl who meets a handsome young man who is studying (and collecting) birds; initially, she sets off to help him find the rare (for that area) bird of the title, but gradually she comes to a realization that the young man is cruel in his wanton destruction of that which he claims to love; she rejects his somewhat creepy "friendship," and we sense that she will lead a life of loneliness and isolation but perhaps w/ solace from a love of nature and of animals - far more rich and pure than that of the man who shoots birds and collects their bodies for display. These stories each contain moments of insight that stand up against some of the best writing of her time, though in a sense SOJ was eclipsed by the early Modern movement - Joyce, Hemingway, Woolf - that shortly followed on pigeonholed as a "women's writer." That may be true re her primary readership, but she is worth a look from anyone interested in early 20th-century fiction.