Forty-six years after “The Bell Jar” author Sylvia Plath committed suicide by gassing herself while he slept in another room, her son, Nicholas Hughes has also chosen to take his own life.
On Sunday, his sister Frieda told The Times that Hughes had hanged himself on March 16 at his Alaskan home after a long battle with depression.
Hughes was 47, unmarried and had no children. He was a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
He was just a baby when his mother killed herself in response to her husband, poet Ted Hughes, having left her for the wife of another poet. Plath, as a struggling single mother of two young children. eventually went through a mental collapse and committed suicide. Rather ironically, Hughes’ mistress, Assia Wevill, also gassed herself and her child six years later.
Could Hughes’ death have been due to an inherited tendency towards depression and suicidal urges? Research does indicate that depression is, at least in part, due to genetic inheritance, so Hughes may well have inherited his tendency towards depression from his mother. One has to wonder though what effect his environment – having a mother who died by her own hand while he was just a baby – might have had on him.
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