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Sylvia Plath's son commits suicide
The son of tragedy-scarred poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has killed himself 46 years after his mother

LONDON (AFP) – The son of tragedy-scarred poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has killed himself 46 years after his mother gassed herself, The Times reported on Monday.

Nicholas Hughes hanged himself in his home in the US state of Alaska last week after battling depression, his sister told the newspaper, 40 years to the day after Hughes' next lover also killed herself.

Hughes was a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, although he had recently left the post shortly before he died to set up a pottery at home.

"It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska," Frieda Hughes said in a statement published by The Times.

"He had been battling depression for some time."

Nicholas Hughes was unmarried, and had no children.

Plath killed herself by breathing in fumes from a kitchen oven in February 1963, preventing the fumes from seeping into her children's room by sealing the kitchen door with towels.

Ted Hughes, who died in 1998, suffered another loss six years later when his mistress Assia Wevill gassed herself and their daughter on March 23, 1969, in an apparent copycat suicide.

Critics have long accused the English poet of driving Plath -- whom he met when she was on a Fulbright Scholarship from the United States -- to her death because of his relationships with other women.

Hughes remained silent on Plath's death for years, until shortly before his death when he examined their turbulent life together and his reaction to her death in Birthday Letters, published in 1998.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090323/wl_uk_afp/britainusliteraturesuicide