Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s Son Commits Suicide

A sad legacy:

The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.

Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.

He was 47, unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Dr Hughes’s death adds a further tragic chapter to a family history that has been raked over with morbid fascination for two generations.

I liked Plath's poetry when I was in college but it's been years since I've re-read any of her work so I'm hard-pressed to say what I think about it now. I wonder if it would hold its same fascination without the turbulent story behind its creation.

Of course, I don't hold with feminists who believed Plath took her own life because she was driven to it by an oppressive husband; it's clear she suffered from clinical depression long before she met Ted Hughes and suicide isn't an entirely unheard of result of depression. The suicide of her son proves depression tends to run in families. (Another example would be my favorite writer, Hemingway. Besides himself and his father, his sister, his brother, and his granddaughter have all committed suicide.)

Still, it says something that the woman Ted Hughes left Plath before committed suicide in the same way Plath did. What was it with that guy?

Well, like I said, sad. I'm sorry to learn Nicholas Hughes couldn't keep the demons at bay.