The daughter of Aung San, the father of the Burmese Army and of independent Burma, left her native country with her diplomat mother when she was a teenager, studied PPE at Oxford, and married an English academic. She could have been expected to live out her life uneventfully as a wife, mother and well-bred Burmese do-gooder, writing with mild indignation about events back home. Her adult Burma experience would have been limited to the occasional painful visit to a land no longer her own, stuck in mud of its own making.
But Aung San Suu Kyi was always alert to the possibility of a different future. In a letter to Michael Aris before their marriage, she wrote, "I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them." Aris agreed without hesitation. But despite the centrality of Aung San - assassinated in 1946 - to Burma's idea of itself as a nation, the call from "my people" must have seemed improbable. As Peter Carey put it, Suu Kyi "was destiny's child, but with no very clear idea of where her destiny lay."
Then the miracle, the disaster, arrived, like a clap of thunder. The telephone rang one quiet Oxford evening: Daw Khin Kyi, her mother, had had a stroke and was in hospital. Suu packed, arrived in Rangoon the following day, and in Asian fashion moved into the hospital so that she could keep her mother fed and comforted.
She couldn't avoid noticing the terribly injured young Burmese pouring into the hospital every day: the year was 1988, and the economic ravages of the Ne Win dictatorship had provoked huge demonstrations which the police and army repressed brutally. Suu Kyi looked up from her mother's bedside to see Burma waking from its generation-long sleep.
Nursing her mother, she stayed in Rangoon for month after month - longer than for any period since she was a girl. Slowly and diffidently, she was drawn into the movement for change.
After 26 years of stagnation, as Justin Wintle explains in this well-structured and literate account of her life, time suddenly began to accelerate. The movement for change attained shape and purpose, Ne Win resigned, weeks of anarchy were followed by a bitter crackdown, the domination of Burmese politics by the army found an even harsher form in the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Through these dramatic vicissitudes, Suu Kyi blossomed like a lotus flower.
She was seized on by the student protesters as the best possible symbol of resistance. But she quickly transcended mere symbolism. She found a way to touch the hearts of Burmese people from whom she had been apart all her adult life. And in bringing the different strands of her intellectual formation to bear on her new situation - the Gandhian tradition of non-violence she had learnt in India, the pluralistic democratic tradition of Britain, the Buddhism which only now began really to matter to her as a spiritual path - she formed the opposition in her own intellectual image. In so doing she revolutionised Burma's political possibilities.
The vindication of that achievement was the election of 1990. She was already under house arrest, and banned from standing, when the National League for Democracy trounced all other parties to gain over 80 per cent of the vote. For the military, it was an immense humiliation. Now everyone in Burma and the world knew precisely how much SLORC and its political puppets were loathed and despised.
Humiliation is an unpleasant experience anywhere, but only in Asia - east of Calcutta - is it mortally poisonous. The depth of the army's humiliation explains everything that has happened, and not happened, in Burma since. The army is still in power, as brutal, greedy and self-interested as ever. And Suu Kyi has spent 11 years out of the last 17 locked in her own home. Today she is more isolated than ever.
Yet Wintle ends his biography with an extraordinary assertion. "Kept in captivity in part brought about by her own intransigence," he writes, "the latest apostle of non-violence is imprisoned by her own creed."
But what else could she have done? She could have gone home to take care of her family. People would have understood. Instead, repeatedly, she has braved the regime's malovelent stare; she has learnt precisely what it means to be needed, and has responded without stint. She has given the whole world, Burmese generals included, an extraordinary demonstration of seriousness.