Free Republic

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 He was only...

Nicholas Hughes, the son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has killed himself at the age of 47. The couple's other child, Frieda Hughes, told the Times newspaper that her brother had been battling depression for some time. Hughes had been working as a professor in Alaska. His sister paid tribute to "a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him". Plath took her own life in 1963 when her two children were infants. The writer also had a history of depression and her novel, The Bell Jar, is one of the most acclaimed depictions of the...

LONDON (Reuters) - The daughter of Boston-born poet Sylvia Plath has resorted to verse to vent her anger at plans for a major film dramatization of her mother's life and suicide. Frieda Hughes, daughter from Plath's celebrated marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, expresses her contempt for the plan in a poem entitled "My Mother." "My buried mother / Is dug up for repeat performances," she writes in the poem, set to appear in the March edition of women's lifestyle magazine "Tatler." "Now they want to make a film / For anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body,...