Nicholas Hughes

Nicholas Hughes was the younger child of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, only thirteen months old when Plath died by suicide. The book returns to him first as a nursing infant cared for by his mother, then as one of the children left behind after her death, and finally as an adult whose suicide in Alaska in 2009 extends the family’s history of loss.

Identity and Early Life

Nicholas was Plath’s second child. Both of her births were described as quick and easy, and the births had brought happiness to a life otherwise marked by distress. In the weeks after Nicholas was born, Plath arranged childcare with Ted Hughes so she could write in her studio. Six weeks after the birth, she told her mother that she was beginning to spend more than two hours writing in the mornings and hoped to extend that time as Nicholas stopped waking to nurse during the night. In April, she wrote of the joy her children gave her; by June, she reported feeling happier than she could remember.

That account places Nicholas in a vivid but brief scene of infancy: waking at night to feed while his mother resumed her work. Plath wrote Ariel in the immediate postpartum period following his birth, making his earliest months part of the book’s contrast between maternal care, creative energy, and the later fact of her death.

Childhood After Plath’s Death

Nicholas was thirteen months old when Plath died. The narrator imagines the morning after her death through the children’s perspective, but notes that those who found Plath’s body arrived before the children woke. The passage emphasizes the terrible distance between the ordinary needs of a sleeping infant and the adult catastrophe that had taken place in the house.

After Plath’s death, Ted Hughes had another daughter with Assia Wevill. Assia lived with him and acted as a mother to Nicholas and his older sister, Frieda, though she and Hughes never married. Their household was later shattered when Assia died by suicide with her daughter Shura in 1969. The book identifies Nicholas as one of the children left bereaved by these deaths, without supplying further details of his childhood or his relationship with Assia.

Death and Narrative Significance

Nicholas died by suicide in Alaska in 2009. The account gives no further circumstances, and does not explain his motives. Instead, it places his death at the far end of a sequence that began with Plath’s suicide and continued with Assia and Shura’s deaths. The narrator invokes the psychiatric term for an extended suicide in discussing the deaths of Assia and Shura, then widens the frame to include Nicholas’s later death.

The movement from Plath’s London home to Alaska gives the family history a stark geographical reach. Nicholas appears in the book in two sharply separated moments: first as the infant whose nighttime nursing shaped his mother’s mornings, and later as an adult whose death makes the earlier losses seem to reverberate across generations. The narrative presents that recurrence as a haunting pattern, not as an explanation of Nicholas’s life or a claim about what caused his suicide.