Twain himself said, "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books." A serious, impassioned, meticulously researched story about a compelling heroine, the Maid of Orleans, Twain viewed the work both as a bid to be accepted as a serious writer and as a gift of love to his favorite daughter, Susy, who would die tragically three months after Joan of Arc was published.

Although set in 15th century Europe, Joan of Arc is a key text for anyone who would understand the ambivalence that greeted the "New Women" in turn-of-the-century America. Twain's novel, as Susan Harris notes in her afterword, illuminates "some of the major currents, and contradictions, of turn-of-the-century life and thought."