More darkness in the sad legacy of Sylvia Plath. Her son, Nicholas Hughes, killed himself on March 16 -- 46 years after his mother committed suicide and almost 40 years to the day after his stepmother did the same, according to the AP. Hughes, who was 47 and was a professor of marine biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, had battled depression, his sister said.

Nicholas Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents, Plath and poet Ted Hughes, separated, and still an infant when his mother died in February 1963, the AP said. 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."

Plath, of course, was famous for her novel The Bell Jar, which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the "Ariel" poems. I read her novel in college in the early 1970s, as part of a course in feminism -- the  movement was really gathering steam at the time. It was a tumultuous period in America (this hardly seems like the same America sometimes) and I remember Plath's work for helping to expose a rather sheltered teen to the complexities, difficult choices and darkened corners of the world.