For those able to listen to BBC Radio 3 , Frieda Hughes , the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, will be the guest of Michael Berkeley's Private Passions , Sunday 28 February 2010 at noon. Thanks to Gail Crowther for bring this to our attention.

A round-up of recent and relatively recent news, reviews, and stuff. David Trinidad, author of The Late Show , co-editor of Court Green , and teacher at Columbia College in Chicago, has recently published a beautiful elegy " For Nicholas Hughes " in The International Literary Quarterly 's November 2009 issue (9). Though I haven't yet read it, earlier this week Student Pulse published Sandra L. Meyer's " Examining Oppression Through the Lives and Stories of Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Perkins Gilman ." Harvard professor and poet Stephen Burt published " Smothered to Smithereens: The Poetics of Motherhood " in the current Boston Review . On a similar note, poet and novelist Nick Laird's " Poems for a Baby " appears in today's The Guardian . Though I missed it at first, on 30 December 2009, Paul Taylor at The Independent published " Writers' Archives: A Sad Estate of Affairs ." I suspect some of this bl...

By and large, the biggest - and saddest - news this year was the death of Nicholas Hughes by suicide in March. Plath said it best, "A smile fell in the grass." In January , London was treated to Robert Shaw's production of Plath's "Three Women". The play was on at Edinburgh in August and I'm still hopeful the company can come west to Boston or New York. While the play received mostly positive reviews, from the standpoint of bring Plath's words to a greater audience it was a huge success. Also in January, the website ladylazarus.tv was launched by Florian and Sonja Flur. The website has been updated so please check back to it! The Flur's visited Boston in March and we met up so that I could show them the Plath sites. It was a very memorable day - certainly one of the best of the year - and they were very gracious guests. In April we voted "Three Women" to be our favorite poem in the 2009 Sylvia Plath Poetry tournament. ...

On Sunday, David Barstow of The New York Times published " A New Chapter of Grief in the Plath-Hughes Legacy " on the death of Nicholas Hughes. This is a very good article on the subject, certainly one of the finest published in the last three weeks. Thanks to Amanda for pointing this out.

Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, contributes the Op-Ed " A Tortured Inheritance " in today's New York Times . The Op-Ed is on the recent death of Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes which of course gripped worldwide attention the week of March 23.

In the Sunday Times , March 29, 2009, Joe Saxton remembers his friend Nick Hughes. Read " What suicide gene? My friend Nick was brilliant, passionate and fun ". This is a long, thoughtful, considerate remembrance of a man we as Sylvia Plath readers, fans, scholars, etc. "knew" only as a baby. Thank you, Mr. Saxton.

The media blitzkrieg surrounding the suicide of Nicholas Hughes has led many to immediately connect it to his mother's suicide in 1963. Ben Hoyle at The Times authored " Death of Ted Hughes 'drove his son Nicholas towards suicide' ", a follow-up article to his March 23 news-breaking story. In this article, he quotes one of Nicholas Hughes's oldest friends, Joe Saxton, in which Saxton's opinion is that it was the death of Ted Hughes - and not that of Sylvia Plath's - that had a direct relationship to Nicholas' mental health troubles, and ultimately his suicide. While it is certainly more plausible for this to be the "cause" but unfortunately with suicide it is really all a mystery. Which in part has fuelled the conversity for almost five decades surrounding Sylvia Plath's death. Cancer and other causes of death are readily explainable and, to a certain degree, understandable. Suicide is the exact opposite. It is a private decision...

The aftermath of Nicholas Hughes' suicide is now upon us. Judith Flanders writes in The Guardian today " This is not a curse Reactions to Nicholas Hughes's death are all too predictable ". This is a very good response and reaction to the sensation that blew in yesterday. Especially the closing paragraph. And then on the other side: The Mirror 's " Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas Hughes hangs himself, like his mother " by Rebecca Evans. The headline indicates that Plath hung herself, which we know is incorrect. Equally atrocious is the First Post 's " Sylvia Plath and the child she killed " by Coline Covington. It must be easier to blame Plath for Nicholas' decision. Other recent news articles and obituaries are: Geoffrey Levy's " His father drove his mother to kill herself. So what does the suicide of Ted Hughes' son tell us about his poisonous legacy? " in the Daily Mail , Christina Patterson's " ...

The Times , and other news sources, are reporting the suicide of Nicholas Hughes , the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Other news stories: The Telegraph , Los Angeles Times Blog , Fairbanks Daily News Miner , The Guardian , Daily Mail , New York Times , BBC News , New York Press , Evening Standard , Toronto Globe and Mail , USA Today , CNN , ... At the Guardian Blog, Judith Flanders writes, " Nicholas Hughes's death tells us nothing about Sylvia Plath's poetry ". Erica Wagner contribues an article to The Times , " Obsession with self set limits on Sylvia Plath's poetry ". Nicholas Farrar Hughes January 17, 1962-March 16, 2009