Even overlooking the shortcomings of the source material, it’s not immediately obvious why the Little House books should have been so wildly successful. While full of adventure, they present fairly simple portraits of human character—Pa is full of heart, Ma of patience, Mary is incessantly good, only Laura struggles with how to be in the world of people—and the books often eschew interior development for simple descriptive action. Set against the wide-eyed, earnest, mischievous, and fictional persona presented in the Little House novels—the Laura that appears in Pioneer Girl is savvy; a child voiced by a woman who has been made aware of adult concerns. Much was lost in the process of abridging to protect younger readers from the harsher reality of Wilder’s lived experience. (In an anecdote left out of the Little House books, a preteen Laura, hired as an overnight nursemaid, awakens to find a whiskey-drunk man looming over her bed, unsuccessfully ordering her to “lie down and be still!”) But there is a great deal missing from here, too, and Pioneer Girl is in many ways more simplistic—its shambling story vastly less troubled by narrative detail and descriptive scene-setting, its writing clearly that of an amateur.

This new collection of Wilder’s letters initially does little to fill in the missing facets of her personality. In early exchanges between the 1890s and 1920, there are simple greetings, letters as short as telegrams, even a few receipts. Often, Anderson’s prefatory material is more illuminating and interesting, and also lengthier, than the letter it introduces. But as the years go by, a few episodes round out some edges. When Wilder travels, her letters reveal a woman enamored with landscape and the essence of the West, hinting at her future career. “The foundation color of the buildings is soft gray,” she wrote to Almanzo from San Francisco in 1915, “and as it rises it is changed to the soft yellows picked out in places by blue and red and green and the eye is carried up and up by the architecture, spires and things, to the beautiful blue sky above.” Later in life, as the Little House series grew in popularity, her letters are devoted to readers—children, parents, schoolteachers, librarians, even a congressman—who flood Wilder with fan mail. The Laura in this period is given to mildly political disquisitions on how things used to be. “The children today have so much that they have lost the power to truly enjoy anything,” Wilder wrote from her ten-room house in 1944. “They are poor little rich children.”

In these correspondences, Wilder dug into the narrative she’d absorbed of her family’s success through determination and entrepreneurial drive. As she repeatedly answered the same questions about the fates of her characters, frequently referring to herself as “Laura,” she consistently upheld her books’ fictions as “truth.” In 1943 she assured a fan that the stories were “literally true, names, dates, places, every anecdote and much of the conversation are historically and accurately true,” but we know this to be false. In letters to Rose from early 1938, as the mother-daughter team conferred about the editing of By the Shores of Silver Lake and the preparation of its sequel, The Long Winter, Wilder discusses the fabrication of the novels’ recurring neighbor character, Mr. Edwards, and explains the creation of her nemesis Nellie Oleson as a composite, modeled after a few different girls from her childhood. But to fans she maintained the fiction: “I heard some years later that she married and went with her husband to Washington state,” Wilder wrote about “Nellie” to a fan in 1943. “There the husband was arrested and sent to the penitentiary for embezzlement, and … Nellie died a few years later.”

Wilder also routinely offered proclamations about the hardships of her upbringing that contrasted with what she saw as the coddling of contemporary youth, writing disparagingly in many of her letters of the “New Dealers” and their dilution of pioneer-hard values. These opinions were often at odds with the role of government in her family’s life: Wilder was secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield Farm Loan association, which made federal loans more accessible for rural farmers, and her father served the nascent prairie authority in various capacities, including as constable and a justice of the peace for De Smet in the 1880s. Wilder papered over these nuances—some of which, such as the federal aid her father requested in the wake of a grasshopper plague, Smith Hill suggests she may not even have been aware of—and continued to insist on the truth of the way of life she was raised in. Perhaps this is just the gentlest of the ravages of age. (Rose, for her part, became a writer of libertarian-edged books and anti-government tracts, which she penned from a late-in-life Connecticut hermitage.) Delivering bittersweet pronouncements about American life as it had been and no longer was, Wilder recognized that the world was passing her by. “I love to go for a drive as well as I ever did,” she wrote to Ursula Nordstrom, her editor, in 1943, but clarified: “We don’t drive horses now. We drive a Chrysler.”