Sylvia Plath’s Son Kills Self

plath_507888aThe 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 (pictured as a baby with his mother) 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.

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