We’re excited to announce that we’ve recently acquired The Secret History of Wonder Woman by New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore.
Lepore's book tells the story of one of our greatest pop culture icons, as well as revealing the secret life of her highly influential creator and the real heroines who inspired him. Ultimately, she tells the story of women's experience in the twentieth century as it has never been told before -- from the women's suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s to the troubled place of feminism a century later.
Commanding a vast and passionate following, Wonder Woman has never been out of print in seven decades. She appeared in 1941, a liberated and powerful female superhero at a time when women's role models were stiflingly conservative. Her creator was American psychologist William Moulton Marston, who was inspired by legends of the warrior princesses of the Amazon and by early feminists, beginning with the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst.
Through extensive research, Lepore paints a compelling portrait of Marston, revealing him to have been talented and charismatic, but also deeply conflicted. He wrote a column celebrating conventional family life, but practised extraordinary sexual nonconformity, with his wife and mistress living under the same roof. The inventor of the lie detector, he lived a life of secrets -- which he then spilled onto the pages of the Wonder Woman comics he wrote.
We’ll be publishing The Secret History of Wonder Woman in November -- just in time for Christmas.
