Writer acknowledged Dundee’s role in firing her vivid imagination

The setting and scenario which inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein could themselves have been taken from a Gothic ghost story.

She spent 15 months with the Baxter family in Dundee – staying in the South Baffin Street property which was originally constructed as the Countess of Strathmore’s dower house – before embarking on travels in Europe with Percy Shelley, whom she would marry in 1816.

In the summer of that year, and still aged just 18, Mary found herself in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in a company which included Lord Byron and John William Polidori, the man credited with creating the vampire genre of fantasy fiction.

Byron’s reading of Fantasmagoriana in the atmospheric setting of the lightning storm-struck lake would prove to be the catalyst for the creation of two iconic works – Shelley’s

Frankenstein and The Vampyre by Polidori – a tale which influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, was published two years later and in a foreword to a later version of the novel its author acknowledged the influence of Dundee on her early writings.

She said: “I made considerable visits to the more picturesque parts but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay near Dundee.

“Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them – they were not so to me then.

“They were the eyry of freedom and the pleasant region where unheeded I could convene with the creatures of my fancy.”

Shelley’s later years were blighted by illness and she died in February 1851 from a suspected brain tumour.

To fulfil her final wishes, the coffins of her parents were exhumed and buried with her in the graveyard of St Peter’s Church in Bournemouth.