The overall response to Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan Arc was overwhelmingly negative. Twain's close friend and the very influential Atlantic Monthly critic William Dean Howells, who later wrote the biography My Mark Twain, wrote a review of Personal Recollections in Harper's Weekly in 1896, the year of the book's publications. Howells traces the genealogy of historical fiction from Sir Walter Scott to Henry James before naming his only complaint: the intrusion of medieval ideas into the modernity of the narrator's worldview. Howells insisted that "I am not at all troubled when he comes out with a bit of good, strong, downright modern American feeling; my suffering begins when he does the supposed medieval thing" (Zwick). He also believed that Twain's humor was the book's saving grace, for thought the book was intended to be serious, the humorous moments provided a much-needed break from battle scenes.

Harry Thurston Peck, in a review published in The Bookman in 1901, speaks of "one gentleman who succeeded in reading Joan of Arc to the end, but he was a book reviewer and had to do it because he was a conscientious man" (Zwick). He himself "tried it several times, and then gave it up because of its egregious dulness" (Zwick). Most other reviewers agreed with his view that "Mark Twain is first and last and all the time [. . .] a humourist and nothing more" (Zwick).

Albert Bigelow Paine's Mark Twain: A Biography (1912) describes the reaction to Personal Recollections:

Those who began reading it for its lofty charm, with the first hint of Mark Twain as the author became fearful of some joke or burlesque. Some who now promptly hastened to read it as Mark Twain's, were inclined to be disappointed at the very lack of these features. When the book itself appeared the general public, still doubtful as to its merits, gave it a somewhat dubious reception. The early sales were disappointing. Nor were the reviewers enthusiastic, as a rule. (Zwick)

He goes on to call it "Mark Twain's supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most delicate, the most luminous example of his work" (Zwick). Twain himself agreed that it was his best book, and the only one he ever dedicated to Livy, his beloved wife. It is ironically appropriate to dedicate a book about a fictional ideal True Woman to Twain's own living version of one.