Considered by many to be Welty's best novel, The Optimist's Daughter has garnered the admiration of readers and critics from the time of its publication to the present. In U.S. News and World Report, a critic declares that the publication of this novel secured Welty's position among the great American writers. Scholars find the novel so rich in material that many critical papers have been written about it, considering such ideas as Welty's use of landscape, her place among southern writers, and her portrayal of female characters, which many interpret as feminist in perspective.

Commentators are quick to praise Welty's stylistic choices in The Optimist's Daughter. Howard Moss of New York Times Book Review is impressed with Welty's skill in creating such a lush story in such a short novel. He describes it as "a miracle of compression, the kind of book, small in scope...