Early Life
Nicholas was born in North Tawton, Devon, England in 1962. Through his father's mother, Hughes was related to Nicholas Ferrar (1592 – 1637).
After her son was born, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous collection of poems, (the posthumously published Ariel) and published her semi-autobiographical novel about mental illness The Bell Jar. In the summer of 1962, Ted Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill; Hughes and Plath separated in the autumn of 1962. On February 11, 1963, while Nicholas and his sister slept upstairs, Plath taped shut the doorframe of the room in which the children slept, then placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure fumes could not escape to harm the children, and committed suicide using the toxic gas from the kitchen oven.
Plath addressed one of her last poems, "Nick and the Candlestick", to her son:
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo..
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
After their mother's death, Ted Hughes took over the care of his two children, and raised them with his second wife, Carol, on their farm in Devon after their marriage in 1970. Despite the posthumous fame of Sylvia Plath, and the growing literary and biographical writings about her death, Nicholas was not told about the circumstances of his mother's suicide until the 1970s. In 1998 Hughes published Birthday Letters, over 30 years of poems about Plath, which he dedicated to his two children.
In the poem "Life After Death" Hughes recounts how:
Your son's eyes.... would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
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