ALL superheroes have strange myths of origin, but the politically and erotically charged back-story of Wonder Woman outstrips any comic book. Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Harvard historian, 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.

Surprisingly, the truth about Wonder Woman’s creator remained “a family secret, locked in a closet” until his children gave Lepore the key. From their writings and memories, she has produced a startling and intelligent double biography. Marston is the real hero of it; Wonder Woman doesn’t even arrive, in her star-spangled