Culture

Sylvia Plath's Son Nicholas Hughes Commits Suicide

by Jordan Yerman | March 23, 2009 at 09:33 am

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Nicolas Hughes, son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, was found dead after committing suicide. This took place 46 years after his mother's own suicide, after her husband left her for another man's wife.

According to Frieda, his sister, the former marine biologist and professor had been battling depression for a long time. This is the end of a strange literary saga, as the public was captivated by the lurid story of Hughes and Plath.

Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas Hughes committed suicide March 16, his sister Frieda announced in a statement Sunday. Nicholas had been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, but had left to pursue pottery at home. His mother killed herself on Feb, 11, 1963, when Nicholas was just past his first birthday; he was 47 at his death. He had long suffered from depression.

Hughes did everything that he could to shield them from the increasingly lurid interest in their mother and did not tell them that she had killed herself until they were teenagers.

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sara star

at 11:16 on March 23rd, 2009

How very sad... His stepmother also killed herself, along with his half sister... Gwenyth Paltrow's movie was just wrenching!

Those who know little else about his mother know that she was the American-born poet who gassed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. Plath had placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure the fumes did not reach her children. She had been distraught at the break-up of her relationship with Hughes, following her discovery of his infidelity. Six years after their mother's death, in 1969, their father's then partner, Assia Wevill, also killed herself, killing her four-year-old daughter Shura in the process.

mtammas

at 11:33 on March 23rd, 2009

Thank you for this posting, Jordan. Anything that draws attention to the toll that depression takes on individuals, families and societies is so important. And this is such a sad story of a vastly talented group. M

Jarrett Martineau

at 12:12 on March 23rd, 2009

Such strange and sad synchronicity.

Roy C

at 17:31 on March 23rd, 2009

Such images of her pain and depression she left us. The Bell Jar.

Fred Miller

at 14:14 on March 24th, 2009

From the wiki regarding Ted Hughes ownership of Sylvia's Journals :

Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he claims to have destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes, "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."

Nicholas was not immune to the Journals and their controversies since his mother, a Pulitzer Poet and Scholar, remains a widely-examined person by Literature and Medical researchers alike.

Thanks for this coverage, Jordan. It reminds me of my own survival battle ever since my Mother passed away in front of my eyes when I was barely five.