The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Overview
Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she also has a secret history.
Drawing from an astonishing trove of documents, including never-before-seen private papers, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore reveals the fascinating family story that sparked the invention of the most popular female superhero of all time. Delving into the life of Wonder Woman’s eccentric creator, psychologist William Moulton Marston, Lepore uncovers her feminist origins: from the warrior princesses of the Amazon, to suffragists including Emmeline Pankhurst, and the women Marston shared his life with – his wife and his mistress. The Secret History of Wonder Woman is at once a riveting work of pop-culture history, and a crucial insight into the struggle for women’s rights in the twentieth century and the troubled place of feminism today.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Paperback
- 198mm x 129mm
- 432 pages
- 9781925106985
- AUD$29.99
- 18 November 2015
Praise
‘All superheroes have strange myths of origin, but the politically and erotically charged back-story of Wonder Woman outstrips any comic book. Jill Lepore unmasks the comic-strip heroine as the strange daughter of early 20th-century women’s suffrage and the bondage-fixated imagination of William Moulton Marston, a hucksterish psychologist who invented the lie-detector test and lived in a covert threesome with his wife and girlfriend … A startling and intelligent double biography.’
‘The book I read most eagerly and discussed most avidly in 2014 was The Secret History of Wonder Woman … Lepore is among the most productive, intellectually invigorating and surprising cultural critics in the US’
About the Author
Jill Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award; New York Burning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War, winner of the Bancroft Prize; and The Mansion of Happiness, which was short-listed for the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
