killed himself in a nearby house in the same street in 1911. Following Plath's death An inquest was held on February 15 and gave a ruling of suicide as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated for six months. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Plath's gravestone, in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers attribute the source of the quote to the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita or to the 16th-century Buddhist novel Journey to the West written by Wu Cheng'en. Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, is a writer and artist. On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes, Plath's son, hanged himself at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, following a history of depression. Works Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight, her first poem appearing in the Boston Traveller. By the time she arrived at Smith College she had written over 50 short stories and been published in a raft of magazines. In fact Plath desired much of her life to write prose and stories, and she felt that poetry was an aside. But, in sum, she was not successful in publishing prose. At Smith she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. Additionally, she won a summer editor position at the young women's magazine Mademoiselle, and, on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea". Later, she wrote for the university publication, Varsity. The Colossus By the time Heinemann published her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems in the UK in late 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had had work printed in Harper's, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. All the poems in The Colossus had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with The New Yorker. It was, however, her 1965 collection Ariel, published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests. "Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme." The Colossus received