Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide

Nicholas Hughes, the son of writer Sylvia Plath and the poet Ted Hughes, has committed suicide in Alaska after a battle with depression. His death marks the latest tragic chapter in the literary dynasty's history, coming 46 years after his mother killed herself when Nicholas was a baby.
 
Hughes, a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences, hanged himself at his Alaska home on March 16, his sister Frieda Hughes announced in a statement on Sunday. The 47-year-old, who was unmarried and had no children, had recently left his post at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to set up a pottery studio at his home. He was hoping to "advance his not inconsiderable talent at making pots and creatures in clay", a family friend told the Times.
 
Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963, gassing herself in her kitchen, while Nicholas, then aged one, and Frieda, then three, slept in a nearby room. Fans of the American author blamed Ted Hughes’s infidelity in part for her death. Six years later, Hughes’s mistress, Assia Wevill, killed herself and their four-year-old daughter, Shura, in an apparent copycat suicide. Ted Hughes died in 1998.
 
While Frieda Hughes, a successful poet, artist and children's author, wrote about her parents for national newspapers, her younger brother preferred to avoid the public gaze. However his life had moved on, the family friend insisted last night. "Nick wasn't just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him." ·