It informs Macdonald's own self-revelations, but also her account of White, who was the ultimate hawking misfit. One can see how the bird's role as a metaphor for the outsider has multiple significances in H is for Hawk. It is this small masterpiece that Macdonald had read since childhood and partly inspired her lifelong passion for hawks and hawking. When the bird finally escaped and his austringer's life ended in failure, White shelved the accompanying manuscript until it was rediscovered by an editor and later published to acclaim as The Goshawk (1951). Less well-known but with an enduring cult audience is White's own strange account of his efforts to train a goshawk in the late 1930s using only medieval methods. Yet she also splices into her narrative a biographical account of a literary hero and fellow austringer (the title for one who trains goshawks): TH White.Īs a novelist Terence Hanbury White (1906-1964) might have lost traction in recent decades, but his sequence of four books based on the Arthurian legends, known as The Once and Future King, was long celebrated and the inspiration for the film and musical Camelot.

H is for Hawk is at once a misery memoir, as the author grapples with the grieving process, and a falconer's diary about the hard-won trust between hawk and human. Macdonald struggled to put her complicated life back together but two parts of her unusual restorative therapy were the acquisition of a goshawk called Mabel and a year-long plan to tame and train her to hunt. Her father, who had been an initial coach and companion in her childhood passion for birds, dropped dead with no warning and left her bereft.

Acknowledged for her fitful brilliance as an occasional author and as the pre-eminent female voice in a province dominated by men, Macdonald found herself approaching her 40s without family, job or home and then – very suddenly – in mourning.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald