Mishmash Musings

What a tortured, twisted existence it must have been for the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes clan. First Sylvia, a poet and author of The Bell Jar, killed herself at the age of 30, allegedly because of her husband’s constant womanizing. She literally stuck her head in the oven, first taking care to make sure that her children were safe and wouldn’t be affected by the gas.

Then, another of Hughes’s women did the exact same thing four years later. This was Assia Wevill, with whom Hughes had been involved for some time. The two even had a four-year-old daughter–whom Assia killed before carrying out the copycat suicide.

And now, news reports indicate that Nicholas Hughes, the 47-year-old son of Sylvia and Ted, has hanged himself. According to Nicholas’s sister Frieda, Nicholas had been battling depression for a while, though no other details are available at this time.

What a tortured family…. It calls to mind the opening lines from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, about how all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Wow.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.