Did your eye snag on “evenhanded,” as mine did? Suspicious little word; it’s only ever deployed with partisan intent. But there are only partisans when it comes to the Fitzgeralds’ marriage — or any marriage, for that matter. There is Hemingway’s opinion of Zelda as a succubus envious of her husband’s talent and determined to lead him to ruin. More recent perspectives on Zelda cast her as a proto-feminist heroine, one of the lost women of history, like Dorothy Wordsworth or Alice James, whose gifts were overshadowed by the famous man in her life. In the case of Zelda, there was outright appropriation — Fitzgerald famously lifted passages from her letters and diaries for his fiction — and when Zelda wanted to write a novel based on her breakdown (later published as “Save Me the Waltz”), the same territory he was exploring in “Tender Is the Night,” their marriage combusted.

This collection has been marshaled with the hope of rehabilitating Scott’s reputation, to portray him as a victim, too — of his alcoholism — and as more supportive of Zelda than commonly believed. The editors and the Fitzgeralds’ granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan, who contributes an introduction, want absolution for Scott, but where is he in this book? His letters are wan and few compared to Zelda’s, often dictated to a secretary. He was never a dazzling letter writer — far too querulous and carping and always, you sense, warming up to ask for a loan. His correspondence, Gore Vidal once said, ought to be preserved, not published.

Read this book for Zelda, even if you’re weary of the cultural obsession with her. Better yet, if you’re disinterested entirely, as I was, and perplexed by the cultural fascination (in recent years, there have been four novels based on her life, and three major biopics are in the works).

I had a vague sense of her as the prototype for Fitzgerald’s lovely, reckless heroines, and that he had cribbed material from her, including Daisy Buchanan’s line in “The Great Gatsby,” upon learning she had given birth to a daughter: “I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” I was anticipating someone doleful, distracted — not this funny, hard-boiled observer of her own life whose letters read like short stand-up sequences. From an early note to Scott: “You know everything about me, and that’s mostly what I think about. I seem always curiously interested in myself, and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me.”

She remains this way: arch, amused, self-mocking, writing parodies of the kind of simpering love letters expected of young women. “Men love me cause I’m pretty — and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness — and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness — One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of course, I was acting.” She has no secondhand impressions or turns of phrase — everything she writes and thinks feels tart, original, lightly distressing.