The Goshawk

Stories of close relationships between men and beasts – Born Free or Ring of Bright Water – possess peculiar fascination. To this T.H. White added an individuality of style and independence of philosophy which make The Goshawk a classic of its kind.
As David Garnett has written:
‘The Goshawk is a story of a concentrated duel between Mr White and a great beautiful hawk during the training of the latter – the record of an intense clash of wills in which the pride and endurance of the wild raptor are worn down and broken by the almost insane willpower of the scholastic falconer. It is comic; it is tragic; it is all absorbing. It is strangely like some of the eighteenth-century stories of seduction.’