H is for Hawk Study Guide

Helen Macdonald was born and raised in Surry, England, a suburb of London. Her parents were both journalists. Early in her life, Macdonald developed a fascination with birds, which turned into an obsession with birds of prey and a plan to become a falconer. She earned a degree in English from Cambridge University, after which she spent time as a research fellow and affiliated scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge, where she taught the history of science. She has also worked as a professional falconer and as a conservationist across Europe. In addition to H Is for Hawk, she has written four other books: two wildlife guides, a book of conservation essays called Vesper Flights, and a novel named Prophet, which she coauthored with Sinistra Blanchè. In addition to Mabel, Macdonald has trained and lived with many other birds, including another goshawk and a parrot named Birdoole. Macdonald is nonbinary and identifies with she/they pronouns. She lives in the appropriately-named Hawkedon (Hill of the Hawks), Suffolk, England.

T. H. White acquired and trained Gos during the late 1930s, a period of growing existential dread in England as it became increasingly clear that the so-called “Great War” (World War I) did not decisively address the root causes of political instability across Europe. As Europe watched Hitler rise to prominence in Germany, White was only one among many writers, philosophers, and thinkers exploring questions of might vs. right, the necessity of war, and the meaning of justice.  Macdonald also explores the lingering effects of World War II on the British psyche through her portrait of her father. World War II saw a great deal of destruction in England thanks to the Blitz of Britain, a coordinated campaign of bombing raids by the Germans in 1940 and 1941. Tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives and hundreds of thousands were injured during the Blitz. This inaugurated a plane-spotting craze. The decades after World War II also saw the birth of the modern conservation movement in England, which began to gain serious traction with the Countryside Act of 1968. Increasing attention to rehabilitating wild spaces in the aftermath of the war’s destruction allowed for species that had previously gone extinct in England, like goshawks and avocets, to reestablish a presence—sometimes with human help and sometimes without it.

In addition to citing many falconry guidebooks, Macdonald engages directly and at length with three works written by T. H. White. The Sword in the Stone tells the story of King Arthur’s childhood, and White published it separately in 1938. He subsequently wrapped it into The Once and Future King, his epic cycle of four fantasy novels which explore 20th-century concerns through the lens of Arthurian mythology. Macdonald also describes large sections of The Goshawk, the memoir White composed about his own attempts to train a goshawk in the 1930s. Other notable memoirs about raising birds (especially in the context of grief and loss) include George: A Magpie Memoir, written by Freida Hughes and published in 2023, and Julia Zarakin’s 2020 Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder. Katherine Raven’s 2021 memoir, Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship, also explores the power of nature and the sense of kinship people can develop with animals, but with a fox taking the place of the other books’ birds.