Nicholas Hughes, the 47-year-old son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, committed suicide last week at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, 46 years after Plath killed herself.
Nicholas Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself March 16, Alaska State Troopers said. He was the only member of his immediate family not to become a poet.
A fisheries biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks as a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences.
Marmian Grimes, the university’s senior public information officer, said he left about a year ago.
Hughes’ older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, issued a statement through the Times of London, expressing her “profound sorrow” and saying that he “had been battling depression for some time.”
Nicholas Hughes graduated from the University of Oxford in 1984, and received a master’s of arts degree from Oxford, in 1990, before emigrating to the United States and getting a doctorate from the University of Alaska.
Hughes not only taught about fish, he also enjoyed fishing and other Alaska pursuits, such as skiing, boating and hunting moose and caribou. But what stands out the most for Kevin Schaberg, a former student in a fish ecology class taught by Hughes, is Hughes’ vast knowledge of fish.
“Nick was probably one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met,” he said. “When it came to fish, he was a walking bibliography.”
Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents separated and was still an infant when his 30-year-old mother died in February 1963, gassing herself in a London flat as her children slept.
A few months earlier, she had written of Nicholas: “You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious/You are the baby in the barn.”
Not widely known when she died, Plath became a cult figure through the novel “The Bell Jar,” which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the prophetic “Ariel” poems — “I shall never grow old,” she wrote — she had been working on near the end of her life.
Ted Hughes relived the tragedy not only through the constant reminders of Plath, but also through the suicide of Wevill, his second wife, who in March 1969 killed herself and their 4-year-old daughter. He died in 1998.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
