H Is For Hawk

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2014

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-17

Chapters 18-23

Chapters 24-Postscript

Key Figures

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Key Figures

Helen MacDonald

Helen MacDonald (b. 1970) is the author of the memoir H Is for Hawk. She is an English writer, academic, and naturalist. MacDonald is nonbinary and uses she/they pronouns. MacDonald grew up in Surrey, England, and studied English at Cambridge University. Throughout the memoir, she wrestles for control of herself and her world as she grieves for the loss of her father. In this sense, every characterization of other people and animals described in this memoir is just a facet of who she was at the time of writing. This includes her hawk, Mabel. We see the world through her eyes, and in so doing, we piece together the many facets of her personality. This is not the record of the rigorously plotted life of a hero, but one in which describes an extraordinary moment in an ordinary life. In fact, this transcription of the author’s life over her observed phenomenon is among the tendencies the author attempts to interrogate in H Is for Hawk; the more she associates Mabel with her declining mental state, the more mistakes she makes as her caretaker. In the same way, by allowing her father to go, and by not making him a mere aspect of her security and mental well-being, she comes to better terms with who he was in life, and with herself, as well. It is often the prerogative of nature writers to describe themselves as standing outside of the natural world, but MacDonald makes it her point to observe the intersection where nature, death, and human personality collaborate.

T.H. White

T.H. White is the author best known for writing The Once and Future King, the best-known modern retelling of the Arthurian romances. As a facet used to tell MacDonald’s story, however, White features as the author of The Goshawk, White’s youthful book describing his inept but heartfelt attempts to train a goshawk. Unlike MacDonald, White identifies with his hawk, seeing it as a means of connecting with aristocratic British privilege and the heteronormative desire and mastery over nature that such privilege suggests. As a gay man who grew up in fear of revealing his sexuality to his unpredictable and occasionally violent parents, this privilege was elusive, and he took the loss of his hawk terribly personally because it cut him off from his constructed identity.

He was able to reclaim that experience and identity through writing what many critics, including MacDonald, regard as a masterpiece. The Goshawk, in a sense, reclaims White’s lost hawk through meditations on history, psychology and nature. His experience continued to inform his best-known work, as well. The Once and Future King contains observations gained during his experience with falconry.

Alisdair MacDonald

Alisdair MacDonald is MacDonald’s father who died soon before the events of this book. He was a loving father to his daughter and a respected name in London photojournalism. Through her father, MacDonald learned to see the world as through a photographer’s eye, carefully framing the world from the safety of carefully selected vantage points. Her father collated several interests in municipal engineering, nature, and crime within his photographic lens. This lens, MacDonald states, was a form of security during periods of doubt, much like her own interest in falconry and books. His life as a well-loved photojournalist inspires her to remember his life instead of his death and reach out to people as her father did.

Alisdair’s personality developed during the privations of World War II, when German bombers devastated the English landscape and led to widespread fear and insecurity. Just a small boy at the time, Alisdair processed this fear by learning to identify and catalog planes in flight, a habit he retained long into adulthood. MacDonald takes lessons from this work as she processes her own fear and doubt about her father’s passing.