Andrew Marvell (1621–78) has long been regarded as one of the seventeenth century's most enigmatic writers. Over the last twenty years, our knowledge of Marvell's life and works has advanced considerably. A critical biography, new scholarly editions of the poetry and prose works, and a chronology have contributed to no less than a renaissance in Marvell studies. Yet scholars for the most part have been reticent over advancing a re-formed picture of the poet. Nigel Smith's exhaustively researched biography is subtitled “The Chameleon” in recognition of the complexity of the Marvell enigma. Although a relatively short work, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane, by Derek Hurst and Steven N. Zwicker, is an ambitious attempt to puzzle out the various enigmas to paint a more holistic portrait of the writer.

The attempt is largely a success. The authors' psychobiographical approach is lightly but convincingly applied, and each chapter is written with masterly knowledge of Marvell's poetry. The authors note recurring themes in Marvell's poetry, across time and across genre, and link these to the frustrations and paradoxes of Marvell's life: his resentment of clerical patriarchy, against his attraction to the system of patronage; his obsession with the basely sexual, against his idealization of models of asexuality; his facility with modes of civility, against his track record of occasional violence. The authors argue Marvell attempted to reconcile and sublimate these keenly felt tensions in the act of writing poetry. As well as offering insights into Marvell's poems, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane attempts to answer the question as to why Marvell was compelled to write them in the first place.

The authors argue that all Marvell's poetry is linked by an anxiety of attachment. The idea that Marvell's insecurity was based on his status as an orphan is revisited throughout the book. Marvell's poem The Unfortunate Lover is read autobiographically as reaching the “inmost core” of Marvell's “imagined life” (86) in its depiction of the “orphan of the hurricane.” Hirst and Zwicker resist the generic classification of Marvell's poetry and the division of Marvell's life into distinct periods when they obscure important continuities across the life and the poems. The authors argue that all of Marvell's poetry had the same source in the poet's personal frustration at the “gaps between experience and idealization” (160). They suggest that all Marvell's poems are linked by a “heroic and surely therapeutic endeavour to project the self as a whole; and by ‘therapeutic’ we mean that process by which suffering is transmuted into art” (102).

Such an approach risks projecting modern preoccupations onto a period that had limited conceptual understanding of, and interest in, the self. It is an approach implicitly based on a Freudian understanding of human motivation and actions. The charge of anachronism is anticipated by the authors, who present Marvell as a transitional figure living in a period of transition: Marvell's poetic strivings for authorial wholeness anticipate Enlightenment notions of authorial identity and modern notions of the self. Yet if that is the case, why was Marvell so reticent about publishing his poetry, if ultimately the projection of the self was the motivating force behind its creation? While self-understanding and an endeavor to project the self as a whole may be one of the motivations for Marvell's decision to write poetry, his Muse was also fired up by other instincts, not least competition. Marvell was an ambitious man, with a competitive instinct, and the attempt to outdo the work of other writers is a hallmark of much of his poetry, including the lyrics.

Alternatively, the authors suggest that Andrew Marvell could ultimately have been the intended reader of Andrew Marvell's poetry, hence explaining away the problem of his record of nonpublication. Questions of readership have preoccupied Marvell scholars for many years, but the suggestion that Marvell the poet wrote for Marvell the reader is an intriguing one. In our concern to delineate Marvell in finer detail, whether focusing on his politics, sexual identity, or religious beliefs, we can often forget about the depth of Marvell's talent, recognized at an early age at school and also by Milton. Underpinning our interest in Marvell is the quality of the work of a “writer capable of the most supreme control” (102). Perhaps the poems exist because Marvell was ultimately interested in exploring the brute fact of his virtuosity.

One of the pleasures of the book is the authors' unapologetic enjoyment of this virtuosity. Focusing on one particular aspect of Marvell, as critics do, we can forget the reasons why we study him in the first place: the pleasure we derive from his poetry. The close readings of the poems are consistently high, and contextual information is used in an informative manner without disrupting the narrative thrust of each chapter. The authors have painted a portrait of Marvell that some critics may not recognize in its finer details, but they are to be applauded for the attempt itself and for painting the laurel wreath around Marvell's head in particularly bright colors.